http://geology.about.com/library/weekly/aa022303a.htm
Some support for the phenomenon on a local level. It's a BIT of a leap to extrapolate to a global level, however, once again, we're talking about an entire plate moving 30-55 feet, whereas the affect mentioned above is caused by the simple movement of a foot or less of small portions of a plate. So it's not all that out there to theorize that this effect would scale to many orders of magnitude in scope with earth movement as extreme as that.