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Earthquakes power up

Jun 10, 2004

Making reliable predictions about the time and place of major earthquakes is a key challenge in earth science. A more realistic aim, however, is to make probabilistic statements about where and when the next earthquake will take place. For more than half a century the magnitude of earthquakes has been described using the Richter scale, and the probability that an earthquake with a certain magnitude will strike has been given by the Gutenberg–Richter law: the probability is proportional to an inverse power of the magnitude. In other words, the bigger the earthquake, the less likely it is to occur.

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