Instead, stress-triggering theory holds that such aftershocks are simply neighboring earthquakes in areas where stresses have increased.
Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, said the theory has changed her view of "the catalog of earthquake history."
For example, the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was followed the next day by a large earthquake in California's Imperial Valley.
Hutton says that, going forward, new seismic activity should provide ample opportunity to study stress-triggering theory.
She points to the Sumatra area of Indonesia as "a likely candidate for research." The area witnessed a magnitude 9.3 quake on December 26, 2004, which triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. That quake was followed by an 8.7 temblor on March 28, 2005.
Thomas Henyey chairs the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He says that the orientation of a faultsay, north-south or east-westcan affect how a fault responds to seismic stresses.
"Depending on the orientation of a fault, it may be that the increase in stress produced by a past earthquake will move that fault closer to failure," he said. However, in a fault at another orientation, "the change in stress could actually lengthen the time to the next earthquake or have no effect at all."
The orientation issue is not as random as it may seem.
"Here in Southern California, and I suspect in many places, you don't typically find a situation where faults have all different kinds of orientations," Henyey said.
"Over the long term, [a regional stress field] produces faults of similar orientation," he added. "So when [a fault is acted upon], it almost always increases the stress on the neighboring fault, because if they have the same orientation, it increases the stress."
The more tangible effects of an earthquakenamely the earthshaking seismic wave that rattles cupboards or collapses buildingsmay itself transfer enough stress to trigger subsequent quakes.
"After 2002's 7.9 magnitude quake at Denali Fault [in Alaska], the Wasatch Fault in Utah lit up, Yellowstone lit up," Stein, the U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist, said. "Both places were bathed in small quakes."
"The permanent stresses associated with a quake 2,000 miles [3,200 kilometers] away are zip. They're nothing," he added. "But temporary stress is different. As the waves travel, they seem to trigger little quakes, and some can last for a while."
All things being equal, it seems a simple proposition that the areas of greatest seismic stress would have the greatest seismic activity. But because the Earth's crust isn't homogenous, all things usually aren't equal.
Scientists are developing more complicated models to account for mitigating factors, such as the delays between quakes that allow some degree of stress decay.
Proponents of stress triggering say the theory is gaining ground.
Stein notes, for example, that a decade ago many seismologists discounted the stress-triggering theory, because the stresses involved were so small. But today, Stein said, "Most people would say [stress triggering] is part of the story, a part of the process by which earthquakes are triggered and controlled."
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