Earthquake activity has returned to the Pacific Ring of Fire, and now a new study has backed up fears that a huge tremor is on the way.

Over the past few weeks, quakes have hit near Japan, Guam and Taiwan around the planet’s so-called ‘Ring of Fire’ – a horseshoe-shaped geological disaster zone.

New research in California says aftershocks can occur on the margins of the area in which the quake took place following a cluster of tremors.

There may also be the possibility of a ‘big one’ in the immediate area, according to the researchers.

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The study, published in in the journal Science Advances, involved an analysis of 101 major earthquakes around the Pacific Ring of Fire between 1990 and 2016.

It showed that most of the aftershock activity occurred on the margins of the areas where the faults slipped during the main earthquakes.

Most earthquakes occur when tectonic plates meet and slide against each other, and quakes occur when the strength of that movement is greater than the strength of the rocks, causing a failure at what is known as the fault line: a line on a rock surface or the ground.

This energy is released as shock waves that lead to an earthquake.

‘This intuition has been challenged by statistical treatments of seismic data that indicate that, based on the clustering of earthquakes in space and time, the area that has just slipped is actually more likely to have another failure,’ said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

‘The truth appears to be more nuanced.

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‘Yes, the area that slipped a lot is unlikely to slip again, as the residual stress on the fault has been lowered to well below the failure level, but the surrounding areas have been pushed toward failure in many cases, giving rise to aftershocks and the possibility of an adjacent large rupture sooner rather than later.’

Dr Lay told the MailOnline that ‘it is possible (has been observed) that dynamic stresses from large earthquake can trigger relatively widespread earthquake activation clustered in time.

‘Seismologists look for effects of such long-range earthquake interactions regularly now.

‘Taiwan, Guam and Japan are far apart relative to the static stress interactions, but one could examine the seismic shaking from an earlier event in the region of a later event to see if small earthquakes were triggered as the seismic waves went by which could have led to a cascade of failures culminating in a larger event.

‘Until that type of analysis is done, causal connection between the events is very speculative.

‘Earthquakes are happening frequently in the Ring of Fire, and some apparent space-time clustering could arise from purely random (non-interacting) activity.

‘The most “predictable” earthquakes are nearby aftershocks; after a large event, seismologists have decent statistical models that indicate how many and what size aftershocks are likely to occur for space-time windows around the source.

‘But, the models are not sophisticated enough to tell us whether one of those aftershocks will be “unusually” big, giving a second large event comparable to or larger than the first.’

Lay and other seismologists at UC Santa Cruz and Caltech took advantage of advanced slip-imaging methods applied to recent earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater.

They found most aftershock activity occurs on the margins of the area that slipped in the main shock.

‘This produces a halo of aftershocks surrounding the rupture and indicates that the large-slip zone is not likely to have immediate rerupture,’ Lay said.

The findings also suggest that if unusually intense aftershock activity takes place, a large earthquake in the immediate vicinity of the first event might still be possible.

The study comes after a spate of earthquakes took place in Pacific Ring of Fire during the first two weeks of February.

After a series of quakes hit the Ring of Fire in January, a 6.4 quake struck Taiwan’s east coast on February 6, killing 17 people and injuring at least 180…….Read more: