In the first week of December 2024, Earth moved between Venus and Mars (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnAVIlpA8M0), which resulted in critical lunar geometry. On 5 December a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred offshore Northern California. It was the first major earthquake since August.
The Venus-Earth-Mars conjunction is exact on 12 December and its approach was expected to cause increased seismic activity. With Earth also moving between the Sun, Mercury and Jupiter around 6-7 December, temporal clustering of stronger earthquakes was anticipated (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d76S5yDTXJM). An obvious cluster indeed occurred on 8-9 December and it's probably not the end of the expected increased seismic activity.
