Spatiotemporal clustering and separation in regional earthquakes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the statistical distributions of inter-event distances and times in regional earthquake catalogs to understand spatiotemporal clustering and separation, highlighting regional differences and potential common triggering mechanisms.

Contribution

It extends previous analyses by quantifying earthquake clustering through superimposed distributions and reveals regional variability in seismicity patterns.

Findings

Histograms fit by superposition of short and long distance/time distributions

Clustering indicates possible shared triggering mechanisms

Regional differences suggest non-universal seismicity patterns

Abstract

Spatiotemporal clustering of earthquake events is a generally-established fact, and is important for designing models and assessment techniques in seismicity. Here, we investigate how this behavior can manifest in the statistical distributions of inter-event distances and times between earthquakes from different regional catalogs. We complement the analysis of previous authors (Touati et al., PRL 102, 168501 (2009)) and observe histograms best described by a superposition of two component distributions for "short" and "long" distances and times. Our results quantify the spatiotemporal clustering of earthquakes that are possibly generated by the same triggering mechanism. Independent earthquakes, on the other hand, are found to be separated by long inter-event distances and times. The statistics presented reveal regional differences, suggesting non-universality of the distributions.