Comment on "Do Earthquakes Exhibit Self-Organized Criticality?"

TL;DR

This paper argues that earthquakes do not exhibit self-organized criticality in magnitude, but the timing of events depends on magnitude, challenging some assumptions about earthquake predictability and SOC behavior.

Contribution

It provides evidence that earthquake magnitudes are independent of past events, questioning the applicability of SOC models to seismic activity.

Findings

Earthquake magnitudes are independent of previous magnitudes and waiting times.

Time to the next earthquake depends on its magnitude.

SOC systems may not always show Poisson behavior in time.

Abstract

It is shown that earthquakes do not know how large they will become, at least from the information collected at seismic catalogs. In other words, the magnitude is independent on previous magnitudes as well as on the waiting time between previous earthquakes. In contrast, the time to the next event does depend on the magnitude. Also it is argued that SOC systems do not necessarily shown a Poisson-type behavior in time, and SOC does not exclude the possibility of some degree of prediction.