Precarious trajectories: How far away is the next refugee drowning?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the spatial and temporal patterns of refugee drownings, revealing scale-free statistics similar to earthquakes below 4km, and explores how detection limitations affect observed event distributions.

Contribution

It introduces an analogy between refugee drownings and earthquakes, analyzing their statistical properties and identifying a potential detection cutoff related to technology coverage.

Findings

Drownings exhibit scale-free spatial statistics with a critical exponent around 0.5.

Below 4km, drownings show short-range behavior similar to earthquake distributions.

Detection limitations are linked to radar and mobile network coverage ranges.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the analogy between the refugees' drownings in the sea and the earthquakes' occurrences and focus on the aspect that characterizes the statistics of their spatial and temporal successions. The former is shown to parallel the spatial distribution of consecutive drowning events with the difference that the latter exhibits short-range behavior below $\kappa = 4km$ and it is characterized by scale-free statistics, with a critical exponent $\delta \approx 0.5$, falling within the range of the earthquakes' $\delta = 0.65 \pm 0.20$, as well as finite size scaling beyond $\kappa = 4km$, while the distribution of events' rates exhibits no similarity with that of the earthquakes. Finally, the events' velocity distribution is also recovered. $\kappa$ is suspected to be related to the radar and mobile network's coverage ranges and thus effectively represents a cut-off in the ability of picking up signals on drownings in the sea.