Scale-free statistics of time interval between successive earthquakes

2004/10/05 by Sumiyoshi Abe, Norikazu Suzuki · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Earthquake Detection and Analysis #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #cond-mat.other

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2004.10.040

18 pages, 3 figures

arxiv created 2004/10/05 · openalex publication_date 2004/12/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The statistical property of the calm times, i.e., time intervals between successive earthquakes with arbitrary values of magnitude, is studied by analyzing the seismic time series data in California and Japan. It is found that the calm times obey the Zipf-Mandelbrot power law, exhibiting a new scale-free nature of the earthquake phenomenon. Dependence of the exponent of the power-law distribution on threshold for magnitude is examined. As threshold increases, the tail of the distribution tends to become longer, showing difficulty in statistically estimating time intervals of earthquakes.

Citations

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