Now lets take a look at the nature of earthquakes. During a science program exploring seismic activity, they placed a brick in a hydraulic press and applied pressure on it to crush it until it shattered. In the blink of an eye it appears as though the brick shattered all at once, like a fire cracker blowing up, however.. During this test they set up a high speed camera so they could play it back in ultra slow motion. What happened in 1/100th of a second now took several seconds to see the entire event. The brick did not just shatter instantaneously, little tiny fractures and pieces started chipping all around the brick. Just one or two at first, then the frequency of these little inclusions began to increase until the brick finally shattered. If you were to enlarge that brick to the size of a continent, you would also increase the amount of time, and the amount of energy involved in this event. Of course our continents do not shatter during earthquakes, but rather they slide against each other and the earthquakes are generally caused by the pressure building up until they slip. In most cases the same type of timeline can be seen, by an increasing frequency of smaller significant activity occurring before the major slippage, (or earthquake) occurs. Again, this is not always the case. There have been several 7.5 quakes or there about's that seemingly gave no forewarnings. Could these just be precursors to something yet to come? It doesn't seem likely to me that anything of a magnitude which has the power to shake a vast area of the earth would just snap without some little weak spots giving way under the growing pressure.