Are we living in an age of giant quakes?

Inside Science News Service : The largest earthquake on record was the magnitude-9.5 Chile earthquake of 1960. It accounts for about a quarter of the total seismic strain released worldwide since 1990. The magnitude-9.0 quake in Japan on 1 March released one twentieth of the global total. Richard Aster, of the New Mexico institute of Mining and Technology, says that we may be in the middle of a period of large earthquakes after a lull in the 1980s and 1990s. Global seismic data show periods of relative quiet, with fewer large earthquakes, as well as spikes of activity. The records only go back to the beginning of the 20th century, so there is uncertainty about what, if anything, the clusters of large quakes might mean. Andrew Michael, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, has concluded that the overall pattern of large earthquake occurrences is random, once aftershocks are removed from the data.