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Today at 16:35:50 GMT, an earthquake with magnitude M7.4 occurred offshore of Guatemala.  It was felt as far away as Mexico City.  In the figure below, I have used the earthquake viewer to snap some screenshots of the global forecast contours for an M>6.5 earthquake within the next year.  The contours are pre-earthquake contours, since they were updated at midnight last night.  We will see how the probabilty contours evolve over the next few days.

Many apologies if you have come to the site in the last few hours and found it offline or not operational.  Our primary servers are in the northeast, a location we chose because we assumed it was safe from effects of earthquakes, wildfires, flooding and hurricanes (as Irene demonstrated last year).  But apparently not from storms of the century.  Who knew?  Please check back with us later today when full functionality should be restored.

If you are a regular visitor to this site, you can track the change in earthquake probability in regions such as southern California by the simple technique of taking screen shots and then comparing images from different dates.  Below I show two screen shots of forecast probabilities for two dates, 9/29/2012 and 10/29/2012.  I use the forecast for M>5 within 1 year from the date indicated.  Boxes show regions where the forecast has changed over 1 month's time from 9/29/2012 to 10/29/2012.

As a matter of interest, I ran an ANSS catalog search of the region surrounding yesterday's Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) earthquake.  It appears there were 4 M>5 foreshocks of the M7.7 event that occurred in the hours before the mainshock.  These events are listed below.