Citation

Sarlis NV, Skordas ES, Varotsos PA, Nagao T, Kamogawa M, Uyeda S. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2014; 112(4): 986-989.

Affiliation

Section II, Division 4, Japan Academy, Tokyo, 110-0007, Japan suyeda@st.rim.or.jp.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1422893112

PMID

25548194

Abstract

Using the Japan Meteorological Agency earthquake catalog, we investigate the seismicity variations before major earthquakes in the Japanese region. We apply natural time, the new time frame, for calculating the fluctuations, termed β, of a certain parameter of seismicity, termed κ1. In an earlier study, we found that β calculated for the entire Japanese region showed a minimum a few months before the shallow major earthquakes (magnitude larger than 7.6) that occurred in the region during the period from 1 January 1984 to 11 March 2011. In this study, by dividing the Japanese region into small areas, we carry out the β calculation on them. It was found that some small areas show β minimum almost simultaneously with the large area and such small areas clustered within a few hundred kilometers from the actual epicenter of the related main shocks. These results suggest that the present approach may help estimation of the epicentral location of forthcoming major earthquakes.

Language: en