I can't find any published research by Dr. Kent on this (and the abstracts from the referenced conference aren't on the website yet) but there are some importan

I can't find any published research by Dr. Kent on this (and the abstracts from the referenced conference aren't on the website yet) but there are some important things to keep in mind when considering this type of thing: 1) Earthquakes do not occur uniformly spaced in time. It's not clear what the distribution of inter-event times is, but it's often considered to be a Poisson, Gamma, or other bespoke distribution based on the physics involved [1]. 2a) Earthquakes that happen on a fault in a complex fault network like the Sierra Frontal Fault (part of the Walker Lane / Eastern California Shear Zone system) do not occur independently; there is abundant evidence and physical reasoning to show that an earthquake on one fault or section of a fault may trigger nearby earthquakes [2]. 2b) This triggering probably just adjusts the inter-event time for a given fault segment, i.e. turning the clock forward or back [3]. This can basically lead to 'clustering' of earthquakes on a fault system. 3) We don't really know from the LA Times article whether the baseline earthquake rate was determined over a timeframe that was dominated by a cluster; i.e. insufficiently long sampling time to determine the real rate. Finding evidence of earthquakes hundreds to thousands of years ago, and then characterizing their age and magnitude, is really hard. There are big sample bias problems in a lot of these datasets, and it takes a lot of effort ($$) to minimize it but it never goes away. So be skeptical when you hear that an earthquake is 'overdue'. It is almost always a mischaracterization of what is actually going on, and rarely by the scientists involved... [1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.9909&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133... [2]: http://www.ipgp.fr/~armijo/paraseminario/Stein-97.pdf http://www.ipgp.fr/~armijo/paraseminario/Stein-97.pdf [3]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004JB003405/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004JB003405/full