9When's the Next Earthquake?
“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
John von Neumann, mathematician
9.1 A Very Tough Problem
Unlike the situation for hurricanes, it is not clear whether the recurrence of large earthquakes is better described as time-independent or time-dependent. Sorting this out from the limited data is hard, because big earthquakes on a given fault are hundreds or thousands of years apart. We rarely have more than one observed seismologically, so we have to depend on historical accounts and geological records of paleoearthquakes, known as paleoseismic records. As a result, earthquake histories have a variety of biases. Moreover, even with a good paleoseismic history, ...
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