I’ve mentioned before that I get earthquake alerts from the USGS, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that most of the emails I’ve gotten have been about the western coast of the Americas.

Looking at their front page shows that currently all of the past 7 big quakes they list lie around the west coast (4 off California and 1 each near Alaska, Chile and Nicaragua) where there are a number of plate boundaries. The mag 6.7 quake off Nicaragua was followed in less than 2 hours by a mag 5.9 quake which is below their threshold for a big quake.

The USGS has maps of earthquakes over the last week for North America and South America (which looks a lot quieter). Both maps show the Nicaraguan quakes due to overlap.