Monday, March 1, 2010

Earthquake Frequency Stats

Here's a really good article on earthquake frequency in light of the recent quakes in Japan and Chile.

I'm not going to copy/paste anything directly into this post from that article, but I recommend reading through it. It is a strong testimony to the extremely short memory of us as a society, not to mention how uninformed the public are on earthquakes.

Many of the earthquakes studied in this statistics exercise (M 6.0-6.9) don't even make news because they occur in remote/low population areas, little damage occurs, or quakes of that magnitude occur with enough frequency that it's not unusual to the residents of the area. It's the quakes that size that hit less frequently in populated areas or cause lots of damage/kill lots of people that make the news. It's all about the social impact.

There's the matter of correlation vs. causation and the breakdown of Occam's Razor to some extent going on. Short public memory combined with 3 significant earthquakes since January causes a stir. Sure, there's a correlation. Three large quakes occurred in a short period of time. People died; it was a huge social impact.

Correlation here does not imply causation, however. It's easy to apply Occam's Razor and say, "well, they happened quickly, they must be related to each other."

Not necessarily. In this case, the better application of Occam is to say, "They correlate. They may or may not be related thanks to the large releases of energy from each quake and the resultant redistribution of stresses on portions of tectonic plate boundaries worldwide. But we cannot say causation - not enough information."

Add in the sensationalistic 2012 bullcrap, and it's easy to get swept up in the hype.

In a nutshell, sit down and think about it. Bad things and good things tend to cluster like this, but we're more prone to remember the bad things.

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