Have Strong Earthquakes Been Increasing ?

[Gonzo the Face]

I don't know if anyone else has thought this, but it seems that the number of stronger than usual earthquakes have increased in the past week or so. Seems like the one just north of us started something.

Here is an interesting link.

http://ds.iris.edu/seismon/eventlist/index.phtml

[KhunBENQ]

The past 7 days indeed show an over the average of 5 quakes stronger than magn. 6.

The average is 2 to 3 per week.

Nice tool to kill time:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/

(I compared the last 7 days of this week with the

"More quakes" is an age old question.

But there so many factors to look at that I gave up.

What is a strong quake? Threshold? is just the start.

Your long list contains many aftershocks and other quakes lower than magn. 5 which is usually not counted as strong.

One fact that you should not forget: many strong quakes happen somewhere in the sea or unpopulated areas.

Such quakes rarely make it to the news and go unnoticed to the public.

"Strong" is more associated to "damaging"/"desastrous"/"taking lives".

Edited April 18, 2016 by KhunBENQ

[KhunBENQ]

(I compared the last 7 days of this week with the

-> (I compared the last 7 days of this week with the same week last year)

2603 quakes of magn. 6 or higher since 2000.

See how they avoid Thailand.

Only the north is touched sometimes.

Good news for the rest (living away from the Indian ocean).

In blue: the most devastating earthquake in known history.

No need to name it.

Edited April 18, 2016 by KhunBENQ

[TuskegeeBen]

Yes!

[Mosha]

The blue one could be repeated soon. Only half of the tension was released. Soon in geological terms meaning the next 20 years. On a fault line that wasn't though of as one to worry about.

Sent from my SMART_4G_Speedy_5inch using Tapatalk

[tw25rw]

I was talking to a girl in Ecuador by webcam when the quake hit on Saturday.. She suddenly squealed and sat up and all her stuff behind her was shaking. Then she was cut off.. Was scary, but she was fine.

[CaptHaddock]

Earthquakes do not have an "average." That's to say, the intensity of quakes do not have a normal distribution, but one described by a power curve. If we take a phenomenon that is described by a normal distribution, height of people, for example, and get a good sized sample, say 1000 individuals, our graph will show a Bell curve and we can compute an average. We can be confident that as we continue to evaluate new data points the computed average will move little, if at all. Not so with earthquakes. You can compute an average easily enough, but that doesn't tell you that the next data point won't be 9.0 on the Richter scale and shift your average substantially. Practically, what that means for us, is that a history of small quakes in an area doesn't mean that the next one won't be huge.

[Gonzo the Face]

Here w go again...another strong one, 6.2 in Ecuador yesterday, 20 April. It seems like the world is cracking up. Knowing that Thailand gets a few, and now so many bigger/stronger ones, makes me a little leary.

[kannot]

Here w go again...another strong one, 6.2 in Ecuador yesterday, 20 April. It seems like the world is cracking up. Knowing that Thailand gets a few, and now so many bigger/stronger ones, makes me a little leary.

The world is cracking up.....everyday for billions of years, I believethey worked this out quite some time ago, plate tectonics, get used to it...........then go check out Gondwanaland....its cracked quite a bit