Space-Time Clustering and Correlations of Major Earthquakes

Abstract

Earthquake occurrence in nature is thought to result from correlated elastic stresses, leading to clustering in space and time. We show that occurrence of major earthquakes in California correlates with time intervals when fluctuations in small earthquakes are suppressed relative to the long term average. We estimate a probability of less than 1% that this coincidence is due to random clustering.

5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to PRL

References in corpus (4)

• Dynamics of Earthquake Faults
• Sub-critical and Super-critical Regimes in Epidemic Models of Earthquake Aftershocks
• Statistics of Earthquakes in Simple Models of Heterogeneous Faults
• Earthquake forecasting and its verification

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• Natural Time, Nowcasting and the Physics of Earthquakes: Estimation of Seismic Risk to Global Megacities
• Order parameter fluctuations in natural time and b-value variation before large earthquakes
• Finite-Size Effects on Return Interval Distributions for Weakest-Link-Scaling Systems
• On the motivation and foundation of Natural Time Analysis: Useful remarks