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Related Experiment Videos

Time-decreasing hazard and increasing time until the next earthquake.

Alvaro Corral1

  • 1Grup de Física Estadística, Departament de Física, Facultat de Ciències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain. alvaro.corral@uab.es

Physical Review. E, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
|February 9, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Earthquake recurrence times show a decreasing probability density, meaning longer waits between quakes as time passes. This counterintuitive phenomenon is empirically observed in global and regional earthquake catalogs.

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Area of Science:

  • Geophysics
  • Seismology
  • Statistical Analysis

Background:

  • Earthquake prediction models often assume time-independent probabilities.
  • The stationary case implies a constant average rate of seismicity over time.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the temporal behavior of earthquake recurrence times.
  • To empirically validate the 'moving away' hypothesis for earthquake occurrences.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of two worldwide earthquake catalogs.
  • Examination of diverse regional earthquake catalogs.
  • Statistical analysis of earthquake recurrence intervals.

Main Results:

  • A slowly decreasing probability density function for earthquake recurrence times was observed.

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  • Empirical evidence supports the counterintuitive finding that the likelihood of an earthquake decreases as time since the last event increases.
  • Universal scaling functions were found to accurately describe this phenomenon.

    • Conclusions:

    • Earthquake occurrences are not memoryless; the probability of an event decreases with elapsed time.
    • The expected waiting time to the next earthquake increases with time since the previous event.
    • This behavior is a universal characteristic observed across different geographical scales.