SCIENCE BRIEFING
Times Staff and Wire Reports
The 2007 earthquake in the Solomon Islands that generated a larger-than-expected tsunami -- claiming 52 lives -- occurred in an area that had little seismic activity previously.
Quakes often occur in areas where one of the plates that make up the crust of the Earth is moving downward, beneath another section of crust.
But researchers reported in Friday’s edition of Science that in the Solomon Islands quake there were three sections of crust involved, two of them sliding at different rates beneath the third.
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