ARE ALL EARTHQUAKES CREATED EQUAL ?


In a sense, yes, BUT.... Some are FAST ("Snappy"); Some are SLOW

Estimated energy, E^E, plotted against seismic moment M₀, for a number of large recent earthquakes. Note that the three recent "tsunami earthquakes" (N, Nicaragua; J, Java, and P, Peru), as well as the 1946 Aleutian event (A), exhibit a deficiency of more than one order of magnitude in their E^E/M₀ ratio, as compared, for example, to that predicted by scaling laws ("CB-95").

By contrast, events such as the 1939 Chilean earthquake, and the 2001 Nisqually and Hiroshima (H) earthquakes are "snappy", i.e., they release more high-frequency energy than scaling laws would suggest.

[After Newman and Okal, 1998].