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Gutenberg–Richter law
Law in seismology describing earthquake frequency and magnitude / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In seismology, the Gutenberg–Richter law[1] (GR law) expresses the relationship between the magnitude and total number of earthquakes in any given region and time period of at least that magnitude.
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Gutenberg%E2%80%93Richter_law_in_the_2016_Central_Italy_earthquake_%28magnitude%29.png/640px-Gutenberg%E2%80%93Richter_law_in_the_2016_Central_Italy_earthquake_%28magnitude%29.png)
or
where
is the number of events having a magnitude
,
and
are constants, i.e. they are the same for all values of
and
.
Since magnitude is logarithmic, this is an instance of the Pareto distribution.
The Gutenberg–Richter law is also widely used for acoustic emission analysis due to a close resemblance of acoustic emission phenomenon to seismogenesis.