Some** occur far from plate boundaries. This can happen as long as there is enough stress in the earth's crust to crack the rock.
For example, Hawaii is thousands of kilometers (thousands of miles) away from any plate boundary, but the volcanoes that make up the islands are piling up so fast that they are still experiencing gravitational stabilization. Portions of the Hawaiian Islands occasionally collapse along normal faults, producing intraplate **. The majority** occurs on the island of Hawaii, which is made up of the youngest, recently established volcanoes. The geological record shows that over the past few million years, some of the older islands have experienced severe collapses, and some islands have landslides on shallow normal faults that have slid to the bottom of the sea.
Another example is the basin and mountain regions of the western United States, including Nevada and eastern Utah, where the earth's crust is subjected to tension. **Occurs on a normal fault inland away from the West Coast plate boundary. The tension in the crust of the Basin Mountain Province may be due in part to the lithospheric tension caused by the mid-ocean ridge system subducting below California and now below the basin range.
Normal faults in the area around Yellowstone National Park also occasionally occur large**. The ** in this area may be due to the differential thermal expansion of the lithosphere over a wide area around the hotspot center caused by the Yellowstone hotspot.
Several East Coast cities, including Boston, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina, have experienced disruption over the past two centuries**. The faults beneath these cities may date back to the rift valleys of Pangea and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean about 200 million years ago.
Between 1811 and 1812, large ** occurred in the area of the town of New Madrid along the Mississippi River in southeastern Missouri and western Tennessee. Small and medium-sized ** continue to occur, and the possibility of another destructive ** in the future still exists. The fault system beneath the area may date back to the period of continental collisions and continental rifts in distant geological history, while the most recent stresses in the crust around New Madrid may have come from the massive accumulation of sediments in the Mississippi Delta region, which continued to spread to the southern part of the region.