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Earthquake swarm

Noto earthquake swarm (2020–2024)
Chronology of the 2003–2004 Ubaye earthquake swarm
Complete caption
Each red bar shows the number of earthquakes daily detected (left-handside scale). More than 16,000 earthquakes were detected within 2 years. White circles show the magnitude of ~1,400 earthquakes which could be located (right-handside magnitude scale). Sismalp (the local monitoring network) was not able to locate all events below magnitude 1, which explains why very-small-magnitude events are seemingly lacking. (According to the Gutenberg–Richter law, M0 events are approximately 10 times more numerous than M1 events.)[1]

In seismology, an earthquake swarm is a sequence of seismic events occurring in a local area within a relatively short period. The time span used to define a swarm varies, but may be days, months, or years. Such an energy release is different from the situation when a major earthquake (main shock) is followed by a series of aftershocks: in earthquake swarms, no single earthquake in the sequence is obviously the main shock. In particular, a cluster of aftershocks occurring after a mainshock is not a swarm.[2]

  1. ^ Jenatton, Liliane; Guiguet, Robert; Thouvenot, François; Daix, Nicolas (2007). "The 16,000-event 2003-2004 earthquake swarm in Ubaye (French Alps)". J. Geophys. Res. 112 (B11): 304. Bibcode:2007JGRB..11211304J. doi:10.1029/2006JB004878. S2CID 129318590.
  2. ^ Horálek, Josef; Fischer, Tomáš; Einarsson, Páll; Jakobsdótir, Steinunn (2015). "Earthquake swarms". In Beer, Michael; Kougioumtzoglou, Ioannis; Patelli, Eduardo; Au, Siu-Kui (eds.). Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering. Berlin: Springer. pp. 871–885. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35344-4. ISBN 978-3-642-35343-7.

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