Citation

Jiang CS, Wu ZL. Acta Seismol. Sin. Engl. Ed. 2005; 18(3): 290-296.

Affiliation

Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100081, China

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Seismological Society of China, Publisher Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Long-term seismic activity prior to the December 26, 2004, off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, M sub-W=9.0 earthquake was investigated using the Harvard CMT catalogue. It is observed that before this great earthquake, there exists an accelerating moment release (AMR) process with the temporal scale of a quarter century and the spatial scale of 1500 km. Within this spatial range, the M sub-W=9.0 event falls into the piece-wise power-law-like frequency-magnitude distribution. Therefore, in the perspective of the critical-point-like model of earthquake preparation, the failure to forecast/predict the approaching and/or the size of this earthquake is not due to the physically intrinsic unpredictability of earthquakes.

Language: en