M7.3 Earthquake off Eastern Coast of Tohoku, Japan 12/7/2012

It was just reported that a M7.3 earthquake struck at 8:18:25 GMT off the eastern coast of Japan, in the area of the March 11, 2011 event.  A 1 meter tsunami was reported as well, with at least 1 M6.2 aftershock.  We had been expecting an event rather like this one, as shown by the figure below. I am still at the AGU meeting where a most interesting set of presentations on the March 11 event were given yesterday. 

The figure at left below is a time series of the chance of an M>7.25 earthquake in the Japan region during the next year from 12/6/2012. It can be seen that the computed chance of the event (as determined on 11/30/2012) was about 82%, quite high.  The image at right below is a screen shot of the probability contours from the earthquake viewer with the cluster of mainshock + aftershocks indicated by the orange arrow.  Both images (without the earthquake cluster) can be seen on the poster I presented last monday, shown in my blog posted here previously on 11/27/2012.