Large earthquakes follow highly unequal ones

It was conjectured for a long time that the tectonic plates are in a self-organised state of criticality and that the Gutenberg-Richter law is a manifestation of that.

It was recently shown that for a system near criticality, the inequality of their responses due to external driving would sharply rise and show universal behavior that could indicate the proximity of the system to a critical point.

As a result, measures such as the Gini and Kolkata indices that quantify inequality can also serve as indicators of imminent criticality and those of diverging (system-spanning) responses.

In the context of earthquakes, such a large response would correspond to events of high magnitudes.

In this work, we show with numerical simulations and seismic data analysis that large earthquake events have a tendency to follow events that are highly unequal, similar to the case of a system near a critical point.

Even though this is not a proof of tectonic plate systems being near-critical, a continuous monitoring of the inequality indices of the earthquake time series could be an useful tool for hazard estimates.

We have applied this framework to models of earthquakes as well as to the earthquake time series from various seismically active regions, such as North America, Southern Japan, parts of Southeast Asia and Indonesia.

The findings indicate that the SOC picture of tectonic plates is consistent with the increase in size inequality of earthquakes, even though this cannot be treated as a rigorous proof.