“…Earthquake synchronization has been described in other cases worldwide (see synthesis in Scholz [2010]), along individual faults (fairly synchronous earthquakes on different sections of a fault, and hence clustered earthquakes [e.g., Marco et al, 1996;Barka, 1996;Stein et al, 1997;Ferry et al, 2011;Schlagenhauf et al, 2011]), among a few nearby faults [e.g., Rockwell et al, 2000;Bell et al, 2004;Vanneste et al, 2006;Dolan et al, 2007], and even possibly at the global scale [e.g., Bufe and Perkins, 2005]. The reasons evoked to account for such a synchronization are stress transfers [e.g., Goes, 1996;Chéry et al, 2001aChéry et al, , 2001bFriedrich et al, 2003;Scholz, 2010]-either static [e.g., King et al, 1994;Zöller and Hainzl, 2007], dynamic [e.g., Brodsky 2009], related to visco-elastic post-seismic reloading of lower crust and mantle [e.g., Kagan and Jackson, 1991;Chéry et al, 2001aChéry et al, , 2001bKenner and Simons, 2005], or resulting from fluctuations in loading rate and creep at the base of the seismogenic crust [e.g., Yeats, 2007;Dolan et al, 2007;Scholz, 2010;Sammis and Smith, 2013], and a combination of some of those factors. Stress transfer from a large earthquake would modify the seismic cycles of the nearby faults having a similar cycle (i.e., similar slip rates and similar recurrence times of large earthquakes), and so doing, would produce an emergent alignment of the fault cycles ("phase locking" of the faults) and hence, the clustering and the synchrony of the large events among the faults [Scholz, 2010;Sammis and Smith, 2013].…”