This was an intraplate event.  There is no documented plate boundary nearby.
According to a seismologist at the University of Arizona that I talked to,
the North American plate is slowly moving south against the Caribbean plate
in this area; however, the initiating force has not been defined.  Was there
an ancient paleo-plate boundary, or some type of pre-existing fracture zone
has not been clarified.  

The moment tensor solution showed a thrust event from both the USGS and
Harvard with minor differences.  This would appear to be consistent with
some type of compressive force, but there does not appear to be much
information on how this force came to be.

Here in Arizona, we have large areas of subsidence from ground water removal
so it's not improbable that there may be a relationship with the oil/gas
removal.  The Arizona Geological Survey (http://www.azgs.state.az.us/) has
documented this on their web site under Earth Fissures.  The fissures all
occur in the basin and range portion of the state.

Several years ago, water was pumped into oil well shafts in Colorado to get
more oil out and the water also induced many, many small earthquakes.  They
subsequently stopped that practice.

Bob Hancock


-----Original Message-----
From: psn-l-request@.............. [mailto:psn-l-request@............... On
Behalf Of John Popelish
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 14:16
To: psn-l@..............
Subject: Re: M 6.0 Event Gulf Of Mexico

jonfr500@......... wrote:
> Hi
> 
> The location of the earthquake in a gulf of Mexico is intresting. 
 > There have been other earthquakes happening on the planet
 > that where in unusual locations
 > (see my earlyer email for details).
 > But this one is the strongest one I know about at the moment.
 >  Emsc-csem puts this earthquake at 2km depth, more details here,
 >  http://www.emsc-csem.org/index.php?page=current&sub=detail&id=34030

Has anyone heard a hypothesis that this is the kind of earthquake you 
might expect when you pump millions of gallons of oil out of from 
under the surface?
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