Talk:Characteristic earthquake

Working this up over the next couple of days. --Zeizmic 16:32, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Tone of the article
This article reads more like a class lesson or lecture than an encyclopedia article. For example, it uses the second person to address the reader. It also makes inappropriate asides, often ending them with exclamation marks. While the information seems to be ok, I think this needs to be edited to meet Wikipedia's policies and style guidelines. Gentgeen 09:07, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmm... and 2 years later... chopped "teacher talk" and stuff. Vsmith (talk) 01:17, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * What's the difference of this article between earthquake swarm? They both consist of repeating earthquakes. BT (talk) 02:15, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Just stumbled across this. And though I am really no expert, I was just recently studying this. So I can offer this: a swarm is a bunch of earthquakes of rather narrow spatio-temporal location (months?), while a characteristic earthquake is one that is characteristic to a specific fault segment. The key idea is that faults are segmented, and the length — which limits the magnitude — and other fixed characteristics of the fault segment result in "characteristic" earthquake. It is also implied this includes the amount of strain that needs to accumulate to rupture, and given a steady rate of strain accumulation these quakes should repeat at fairly regular intervals (of decades, even centuries). For a little more on this and some starting references see Earthquake prediction. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:25, 2 December 2012 (UTC)