'Slow Motion' Earthquake Put New Zealand at Risk for Another Temblor

The magnitude-7.8 Kaikoura earthquakethat rattled New Zealand last month may have set up the country for another major quake underneath its capital of Wellington. In the next year, there is a nearly 5 percent chance that a magnitude-7.8 or greater earthquake will strike the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island, Bill Fry, a seismologist and tectonophysicist with GNS Science, a geoscience consultancy service, said Tuesday (Dec. 13) here at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual meetin