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Periodicity and Clustering in the Long‐Term Earthquake Record
Author(s) -
Griffin Jonathan D.,
Stirling Mark W.,
Wang Ting
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2020gl089272
Subject(s) - seismology , geology , poisson distribution , term (time) , earthquake prediction , foreshock , seismic gap , fault (geology) , mathematics , statistics , aftershock , physics , quantum mechanics
Elastic rebound theory forms the basis of the standard earthquake cycle model and predicts large earthquakes to recur regularly through cycles of strain accumulation and release. Yet few individual earthquake records are sufficiently long to test the theory. Here we characterize the distribution of earthquake interevent times from a global compilation of 80 long‐term records. We find that large earthquakes recur more regularly than a random Poisson process on individual fault segments. The majority of Earth's well‐studied faults shows weakly periodic and uncorrelated large earthquake recurrence, consistent with the expectations of elastic rebound theory. However, many low activity‐rate (annual occurrence rates < 2 × 10 −4 ) faults show random or clustered earthquake recurrence, which cannot be explained by elastic rebound theory.