“Researchers find mathematical patterns to forecast earthquakes“. Anthony offers a copy-and-paste of a Eurekalert press release about Spanish earthquake forecasting paper titled “Pattern recognition to forecast seismic time series”.
Why? To ‘prove’ that he has a roving scientific intellect I guess. It wouldn’t be so transparent if you actually made an intelligent statement about it, Anthony. Instead, we get not even a single word.
Couldn’t you even type “Wow!” or something?
Wott's Up With That? 
I don’t know the dtileas of how the faults beneath the Canterbury Plain of New Zealand are connected (and I think nobody else does either), but I am sure that many geologists and geophysicists are working hard to find out.We can be sure that the regions at the ends of the M7.1 and M6.3 fault ruptures have increased stress due to those earthquakes. Some of that increased stress has been relieved by aftershocks, but large earthquakes on nearby faults are still more likely.I would not want to predict a specific magnitude without more information about the faults in the area, but future aftershocks of M 6 would be expected from most M7.1 earthquakes.