The distribution of earthquake sizes is an important quantity, particularly for seismic hazard assessment. Because it tells you the probability of large but infrequent earthquake if you can capture and measure the small ones.
The Gutenberg-Richter law
The probability of an event with Magnitude Mag that is larger than M is
Magnitude of completeness
- Arnaud Mignan
b value
The love of Stefan Wiemer and Thessa Tormann
The moment-frequency relations
- Note that MFD can have very different shape depending on the target. For example, the MFD of a fault or the MFD of a subduction zone can be very different from the Gutenberg-Richter relation.
- And there is a upper bound of maximum magnitude because of the length of plate boundary and the seismogenic thickness. How does GR relation taper? (Kagen, 2002a, 2002b)
- Probabilistic seismic hazard assessment looks at the FMD of declustered catalogs.
Question Does declustered catalogs have substantially different MFD?