Are Large Earthquakes Preferentially Triggered by Other Large Events?

Abstract

The observational science of seismology developed with the classification of earthquakes as either foreshocks, mainshocks, or aftershocks. Foreshocks precede mainshocks, which themselves trigger aftershocks obeying the Omori law. Time-independent forecasting methods do not take advantage of these widely observed dynamics to issue statements about future seismicity. However, time-dependent forecasts use these features but rely on different fundamental hypotheses about their genetic origin. A first class of methods appear quite agnostic on this topics (such as the M8 algorithm of Keilis-Borok and Kossobokov (1990); the Region-Time-Length algorithm of Sobolev and Tyupkin (1997); the Relative Intensity of Holliday et al. (2005); and the Proportional Hazard Model of Faenza and Marzocchi ( 2010)). Some other approaches consider that small earthquakes are mainly passive markers of the stress field in space and time, so their influence on future seismicity is negligible. This is the underlying concept of many earthquake precursor models such as the characteristic earthquake (D.

On the Use of High‐Resolution and Deep‐Learning Seismic Catalogs for Short‐Term Earthquake Forecasts: Potential Benefits and Current Limitations

“…The latter is a significant factor for models of earthquake interactions to track the fine-scale evolution of the stress state that controls the local conditions for earthquake nucleation (Hanagan et al, 2022;Hanks, 1992;Helmstetter, 2003;Helmstetter et al, 2005;Marsan, 2005;Meier et al, 2014). Although counterevidence has been occasionally reported (e.g., Nandan et al, 2022), there is now a growing body of evidence supporting the notion that triggering contributions and local faulting patterns of small-magnitude events help forecast larger earthquakes not only in stress-based forecasts (Cattania et al, 2018;Mancini et al, , 2020Parsons et al, 2012;Segou & Parsons, 2014) but also for statistical models across long-term time-independent experiments (Helmstetter & Werner, 2012;Helmstetter et al, 2007;Werner et al, 2010Werner et al, , 2011 and short-term time-dependent tests (Helmstetter et al, 2006;Werner et al, 2011). Fully prospective evaluations by the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP; Michael & Werner, 2018;Schorlemmer et al, 2018) corroborate these findings (Bayona et al, 2022;Zechar et al, 2013).…”