exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Seems this was a lateral movement along a transform fault, between the Caribbean plate and the S America plate. The latter is in places overriding the former as it moves north northwest and in other places slides past it. There is a diagram in the Wiki entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean_plate
On the diagram, the earthquake seems to have occurred close to the corner between the red line to the west and the lower green horizontal line. The shallow depth made the intensity greater.
I am not sure about the colour coding. From the red and green lines on the boundary of the Cocos plate, it looks as if green indicates a transform fault, red a spreading centre and blue a convergent boundary. So maybe this was a combination of transform and spreading. But by all accounts the plate motions in this region are very complex.
On the diagram, the earthquake seems to have occurred close to the corner between the red line to the west and the lower green horizontal line. The shallow depth made the intensity greater.
I am not sure about the colour coding. From the red and green lines on the boundary of the Cocos plate, it looks as if green indicates a transform fault, red a spreading centre and blue a convergent boundary. So maybe this was a combination of transform and spreading. But by all accounts the plate motions in this region are very complex.
