[rjurney]

Small earthquakes are a good thing, not a bad thing. They relieve stress on the fault without having a major slippage. I think.

[wwweston]

The stress-relief model makes sense to me, but apparently it doesn't work that way:

https://www.sfgate.com/earthquakes/article/do-minor-quakes-p...

[FPGAhacker]

It does, and the article affirms this. However it's a question of relative magnitude. The energy dissipated by the smaller quakes is dwarfed in comparison to larger quakes. The energy of a 5.5 quake is on the order of 1/1000th the energy of a mag 7 quake.

[rjurney]

I guess things didn't end up working that way today. Or maybe the 6.4 prevented the 7.1 from being even stronger :(