Is that not information enough?
The next paragraph could say something like "this is perfectly normal, though, and is very unlikely to lead to an earthquake" or "this means an earthquake is nearly inevitable in the next month" and I'd be no more surprised by one that the other.
>“We don’t know what it means.”
Then...
>Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey said the most likely scenario is that the Ridgecrest quakes probably won’t trigger a larger earthquake.
And of course...
>Also, a creeping fault triggered by a nearby quake doesn’t necessarily mean a big quake is coming. The southernmost tip of the San Andreas fault has traditionally crept in response to distant quakes, including the magnitude 8.2 quake off the coast of southern Mexico in 2017, nearly 2,000 miles away. “But that doesn’t mean the San Andreas went off,” said USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, who was not part of the study.
They do their best to not link to the actual study for which the alarmist headline seems to be derived. It is probably this:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/346
What I'm really wondering is whether the '8.0' figure is present in this paper or not. Because otherwise, where did they pull that number?
"Hierarchical interlocked orthogonal faulting in the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence", Ross et al.
Abstract
A nearly 20-year hiatus in major seismic activity in southern California ended on 4 July 2019 with a sequence of intersecting earthquakes near the city of Ridgecrest, California. This sequence included a foreshock with a moment magnitude (Mw) of 6.4 followed by a Mw 7.1 mainshock nearly 34 hours later. Geodetic, seismic, and seismicity data provided an integrative view of this sequence, which ruptured an unmapped multiscale network of interlaced orthogonal faults. This complex fault geometry persists over the entire seismogenic depth range. The rupture of the mainshock terminated only a few kilometers from the major regional Garlock fault, triggering shallow creep and a substantial earthquake swarm. The repeated occurrence of multifault ruptures, as revealed by modern instrumentation and analysis techniques, poses a formidable challenge in quantifying regional seismic hazards.