If you are interested in the conventional view of things, don't read me. Everybody pushes things, and I push the Scientific Method with Physics. Nobody does that because the essence of the sm is a hypothesis, and the pass/fail of experiments. No institution wants to fail on 'explanations' that have sustained them.
These earthquakes have brought to light (to me) many 'myths'. The USGS was founded because of the 1906 Sanfran earthquake, and a huge famous report. I read that report. The mechanics was based on a steampunk view of the world, and came as an 'explanation', not the sm. You could not argue with this much weight in paper, and the signatures.
They called it the 'Elastic Rebound Theory', and went right to theory and not hypothesis. Basically, they modelled the fault as two big pieces of steam steel pushed against each other. The steam pistons activated, and stress built up on the crack. Then it let go, like a boiler explosion. The steel pieces whipped past each other and even overshot the zero stress spot, due to momentum. Wonderful stuff, all great in a steam era.
If you reformulate in terms of a testable hypothesis, it has failed so many times that we should toss it out in the garbage of failed ideas. This is just like NOAA's 'wind pushes the ocean currents', and NASA's "There's greenhouse glass in the atmosphere'.
There no use presenting any of this, but I try. There are many spinoffs from the usgs model, and one was the concept of 'early warning'. This has bit the dust, but they need it to keep living. On to the next earthquake.
ps this is as close as I go to California in my Grand Tour of the Ring of Fire. Have fun everybody!
