Statistical Features of Earthquake Temporal Occurrence

TL;DR

This paper reviews the statistical properties of earthquake occurrence, focusing on recurrence-time distributions, their universal features, and related phenomena, providing insights into seismic hazard assessment and underlying physical laws.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of earthquake recurrence-time statistics, including scaling laws, universal behaviors, and their connections to broader physical theories.

Findings

Recurrence-time distributions follow a scaling law with universal characteristics.

Hazard decreases with time, contrary to common assumptions.

Correlations exist between recurrence times and earthquake magnitudes.

Abstract

A review of the statistical properties of earthquakes is provided, centered mainly in the work of the author (apologies for that). We explain the scaling law for the recurrence-time distributions, its universal character for stationary seismicity and for Omori sequences, the counterintuitive phenomenon of decreasing hazard with time and the increasing of the expected residual recurrence time, the relation of the scaling law with a renormalization-group transformation, and the correlations between recurrence times and magnitudes. Finally, the connections with Bak et al.'s unified scaling law are analyzed.