New research shows a massive April earthquake triggered multiple rare events.

The 11 April 2012 earthquake was the most powerful strike-slip quake ever recorded.

Not only was the quake of unparalleled power, it hit in the middle of a tectonic plate, not at a plate boundary, like the San Andreas Fault. "So already it has two unusual attributes," said Thorne Lay, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an author on one of the papers published today.

http://weather.aol.com/2012/09/27/weird-2012-quake-signals-tectonic-plate-birth/

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