Universal law for waiting internal time in seismicity and its implication to earthquake network

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that when considering event time instead of conventional waiting time, seismicity exhibits a universal power-law distribution, revealing long-range correlations and aiding earthquake network construction across different regions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of waiting event time in seismicity, showing its universal power-law distribution across multiple regions, contrasting with conventional waiting times.

Findings

Waiting event time follows a universal power-law distribution.

Long-range temporal correlations exist in seismic event sequences.

The distribution parameters are consistent across California, Japan, and Iran.

Abstract

In their paper (Europhys. Lett., 71 (2005) 1036), Carbone, Sorriso-Valvo, Harabaglia and Guerra showed that "unified scaling law" for conventional waiting times of earthquakes claimed by Bak et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 88 (2002) 178501) is actually not universal. Here, instead of the conventional time, the concept of the internal time termed the event time is considered for seismicity. It is shown that, in contrast to the conventional waiting time, the waiting event time obeys a power law. This implies the existence of temporal long-range correlations in terms of the event time with no sharp decay of the crossover type. The discovered power-law waiting event-time distribution turns out to be universal in the sense that it takes the same form for seismicities in California, Japan and Iran. In particular, the parameters contained in the distribution take the common values in all these geographical regions. An implication of this result to the procedure of constructing earthquake networks is discussed.