Universal earthquake-occurrence jumps, correlations with time, and anomalous diffusion

Spatiotemporal properties of seismicity are investigated for a worldwide (WW) catalog and for southern California in the stationary case (SC), showing a nearly universal scaling behavior. Distributions of distances between consecutive earthquakes (jumps) are magnitude independent and show two power-law regimes, separated by jump values about 200 (WW) and 15 km (SC). Distributions of waiting times conditioned to the value of jumps show that both variables are correlated, in general, but turn out to be independent when only short or long jumps are considered. Finally, diffusion profiles are found to be independent on the magnitude, contrary to what the waiting-time distributions suggest. © 2006 The American Physical Society.