Chris,

Now that I'm home and I've had a few hours to think about what you said, let me elaborate on some on this a bit. Real time fault monitoring in the way we know it today was not available in the 1970's or the 1980's. In those times there was no Internet where we have this wonderful opportunity to sit, view things, read material and notice obvious patterns. Even a Mogi Donut would not have been as visible as it is today.

Patterns in seismicity change over time and I'll provide a very good example. In the 1970's through most of 1989 the San Francisco Bay Area had 3.0 quakes on average every 18 days. Mixed within that we had plenty of 4.0 and 5.0 quakes, but not since. This is a direct result of the Loma Prieta earthquake on 10/17/89. Jim Berkland's Seismic Windows Theory provided him with a plethora of hits when he used his 140 mile radius for 10 days a month because his chances of getting a 3.0 were excellent. But today, due to this change, one third of his theory doesn't work anymore.

The coastal events which we can easily see and note today are as a direct result of instant reports and our ability to see them. But it doesn't mean this ever happened before. The issue in Indonesia is the same. While there were large earthquakes along that area before, none of them happened in such rapid succession, so history is being rewritten right now.

What we have to learn is that whatever we have today we have to make use of. Though historically we know where large earthquakes have occurred before, the timing of those events are altered by other intermittent events and as the earth moves all of the time, absolutely nothing is absolute.

The world of geosciences is very slow to accept anything new. It took 50 years for plate tectonics to be accepted, so by the time anyone would accept The Coastal Shove, it will have already come and gone. But the dynamics of what is causing the condition could probably be understood in less than 5 years.

And in closing I have to say that short term earthquake prediction requires making use of the here and now and if the clues are very obvious, then we have something no one else at any time in history has ever been so fortunate to embrace.

Petra