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It's a common occurrence after strong quakes and happened after the 2004 mega-earthquake and tsunami off Indonesia that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations. Three months later, an 8.6-magnitude quake erupted farther down the fault line, killing 1,000 people on sparsely populated Nias island. "But it's difficult to say," said Atwater. "There are good examples of such stresses leading to other earthquakes, big earthquakes, and there are good examples of that not happening." Scientists are studying the March 11 quake and ongoing seismic activity to determine where new strains might be building. "When the main shock is this big, you get a football-shaped region where aftershocks are fair game. It extends in all directions," including toward Tokyo, USGS seismologist Susan Hough and other experts said. But, they acknowledge, it's hard to keep up. "We are drinking from a fire hose here. The input data keeps changing and augmenting," Ross Stein, of the USGS, wrote in an email. His focus now is on the fragment of the Pacific tectonic plate lodged beneath Tokyo
-- movement of which is believed to have caused a 7.3-magnitude quake in 1855 that killed an estimated 7,000 people. "We believe ... the faults which bound the fragment were brought closer to failure by the magnitude-9 quake," Ross said.
[Associated
Press;
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