Wellington has been hit by a number of small earthquakes over the last few days. This morning there was a 5.5 which got me out of bed (at 8am I might add). I listened to a seismologist on the radio talking about the quake. He was asked about a theory that we cling to in Wellington, that small quakes are good because they release pressure and delay the inevitable ‘big one’. He was not exactly reassuring. He said that this can be the case, but that when a fault line ‘fails’, it can upset surrounding fault lines and contribute towards triggering them.
Yes, there is a downside to living on a archipelago that borders two tectonic plates.