Guatemala gets a deep 6

A magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck Guatemala this morning, related to the subduction of the Cocos plate beneath the Caribbean plate. What's distinctive is its depth, nearly 200 kilometers. Earthquakes at this depth are very different from the usual seismic events. According to our understanding of the deep Earth, the rocks should be too hot and plastic to store strain energy, so some other mechanism is responsible for deep quakes. The largest deep quake on record was a magnitude 8.3 event more than 600 kilometers beneath Bolivia on 9 June 1994. It rocked buildings as far away as Toronto, but did no damage anywhere.