Lorna smiled, visibly invigorated by this line of questioning. She loved science like this, the weird stuff that was still being developed. "Absolutely. In fact, intraplate seismic events are some of the most interesting and little understood in the entire field. We know they happen, but we still aren't sure why? It doesn't help of course, that they're rare and many that we're aware of are too far back for accurate information to have been recorded. The most notable one in recent memory was the Gujarat quake in 2001 with a magnitude of 7.7. That one, they think had to do with an undiscovered fault, but given that it's several hundred kilometers from the plate edge, we don't know why. Folding, perhaps or fluid movement beneath the crust. Before India, though, I don't think there'd been a notable event since the Charleston quake in South Carolina more than a century ago."

She didn't have access to nearly the level of research here that she needed to be certain of that. It chafed.