Traditional statistical methods for seismic zonation require information from many subjects, such as regional geology and neotectonics, seismicity, stress field, damage analysis of historic earthquakes, geophysics and others. These subjects are weighted differently during statistics. In fact, the information from most of these subjects is more like fuzzy sets, ie, it is a sort of estimation rat...

The null hypothesis in assessing earthquake predictions is often, loosely speaking, that the successful predictions are chance coincidences. To make this more precise requires specifying a chance model for the predictions and/or the seismicity. The null hypothesis tends to be rejected not only when the predictions have merit, but also when the chance model is inappropriate. In one standard appr...

We investigate upper plate stressing during the earthquake cycle in a subduction segment, using three-dimensional (3-D) elastic models to address the effects of strongly heterogeneous coupling along strike of the interplate interface. We show how heterogeneity controls the locations and mechanisms of seismicity in the upper plate. Oblique subduction segments, two from the Aleutians (Andreanof I...

We present statistical evidence for a temporal link between variations in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the occurrence of earthquakes on the East Pacific Rise (EPR). We adopt a zero-inflated Poisson regression model to represent the relationship between the number of earthquakes in the Easter microplate on the EPR and ENSO (expressed using the southern oscillation index (SOI) for ...

Microseismicity. stress, and fracture in the Coso geothermal field are investigated using seismicity, focal mechanisms and stress analysis. Comparison of hypocenters of microearthquakes with locations of development wells indicates that microseismic activity has increased since the commencement of fluid injection and circulation. Microearthquakes in the geothermal field are proposed as indicato...

To assess whether recent seismicity is induced by human activity or is of natural origin, we analyze fault displacements on high-resolution seismic reflection profiles for two regions in the central United States (CUS): the Fort Worth Basin (FWB) of Texas and the northern Mississippi embayment (NME). Since 2009, earthquake activity in the CUS has increased markedly, and numerous publications su...

[1] For the period 1995–2000, the Nepal seismic network recorded 37 ± 8% fewer earthquakes in the summer than in the winter; for local magnitudes ML > 2 to ML > 4 the percentage increases from 31% to 63% respectively. We show the probability of observing this by chance is less than 1%. We find that most surface loading phenomena are either too small, or have the wrong polarity to enhance winter...

We analyzed seismicity linked to the 2014 phreatic eruption of Mount Ontake, Japan, on 27 September 2014. We first relocated shallow volcano tectonic (VT) earthquakes and long-period (LP) events from August to September 2014. By applying a matched-filter technique to continuous waveforms using these relocated earthquakes, we detected numerous additional micro-earthquakes beneath the craters. Th...

Historically, seismicity documented in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin has been relatively quiescent and earthquakes are usually restricted to the foreland belt of the Rocky Mountains. However, exceptional clusters of events, which have remained active for decades, are recognized in Alberta. In this study we investigate the seismicity in this region using data obtained from recently establ...

We analyzed the historical seismicity in southern California to develop a rational approach for calculating the seismic hazard from background seismicity of magnitude 6.5 or smaller. The basic assumption for the approach is that future earthquakes will be clustered spatially near locations of historical mainshocks of magnitudes equal to or greater than 4. We analyzed the declustered California ...