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Earth science

Lasting earthquake legacy

Earthquakes occur within continental tectonic plates as well as at plate boundaries. Do clusters of such mid-plate events constitute zones of continuing hazard, or are they aftershocks of long-past earthquakes?

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Figure 1: Probabilistic assessment of seismic hazard in the United States3.
Figure 2: Comparison of aftershock decay rates from plate-boundary and mid-plate regions.

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Parsons, T. Lasting earthquake legacy. Nature 462, 42–43 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462042a

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