The number of major earthquakes around the world has almost tripled in the last 10 years.

Eighteen earthquakes with a magnitude of 8.0 or greater has struck around the globe since 2004, compared to 71 great earthquakes during the previous 100 years.

The information was released at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“If we look at all earthquake magnitudes, the past 10 years is not unusual in terms of the rate of events; the rate increases are just seen for events with magnitudes larger than 7.5 or so,” said Thorne Lay of the University of California Santa Cruz. “This suggests that great events were ‘catching up’ on the plate boundary motions in several regions with fortuitous similar timing.”

“The last 10 years have been interesting for seismologists because we have learned that great subduction zone earthquakes occur in many different ways and there do not seem to be any simple rules to predict the kind of behavior to expect,” Peter Shearer, a professor of geophysics at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, told NBC News. “Thus we can’t reliably assess at this point whether the Cascadia subduction zone will eventually break mostly in a single giant earthquake or a series of large earthquakes.”