How were conventional geophysicists thinking about earthquakes back then?
Conventional geophysics people were thinking of it in terms of elastic rebound, a theory that goes back to Harry Fielding Reed in 1910. He was one of the group investigating the 1906 San Francisco earthquake with the Carnegie Commission. In the report they published, he described the build-up of forces and then the occurrence of a crack and the slip on the fault, and then the rebound to a new position, and then the repeat of that. Earthquake cycle. © 2001 Brooks/Cole – Thomson Learning. Download additional figures and descriptions of John Rundle’s work on earthquake research. He didn’t know anything about plate tectonics, of course, but that was the basic idea. That’s kind of where things were, and people were describing earthquakes as elastic dislocations, where you make a cut in an elastic material and move the two sides and glue it back together, and that’s how you describe it. The notion of using statistical mechanics was not there in 1989. Your most-cited paper in the last decade
