Teleseismic b values; Or, much ado about 1.0

In this paper we investigate the value of b in the Gutenberg‐Richter relation for four teleseismic catalogs of earthquakes: Abe's historical catalog, the Harvard Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) catalog, the catalog of the International Seismological Centre (ISC), and the Blacknest catalog. An unfortunate result is that b differs by 30% or more when determined in different magnitude ranges, in different catalogs, or using different methods. For global catalogs separated into shallow, intermediate, and deep earthquake groups, all values determined for b lie between 0.72 and 1.34. We can identify no systematic global variation of b with depth. For teleseismic catalogs it is difficult to believe measured geographic variations in b because systematic errors cause problems of earthquake detection, earthquake location, aftershock identification, and magnitude determination. However, some variations in b are so persistent and large that they must be real. For deep earthquakes in Tonga‐Fiji, for example, various measurements of b He between 1.06 and 1.57, comparable to b for shallow earthquakes, whereas measurements of b for deep earthquakes in the rest of the world are much lower, between 0.53 and 0.96. For shallow earthquakes in the Harvard CMT catalog, earthquakes with thrust and strike slip focal mechanisms have significantly lower b values (0.86 and 0.77) than earthquakes with normal faulting mechanisms (1.06). When we separate the ISC catalog into primary events (mainshocks and earthquakes with no aftershocks or foreshocks) and secondary events (aftershocks and foreshocks), we observe that b for secondary events is nearly always significantly higher than b for mainshocks. However, we show that the difference has no physical significance, as it arises simply from the act of choosing mainshocks as the largest earthquake in a foreshock‐mainshock‐aftershock sequence. When we correct for this systematic effect by comparing the real catalogs to identical catalogs with randomly reassigned magnitudes, we find that b for secondary events in the real catalog is actually lower than expected. Thus among aftershocks large earthquakes are relatively more common than expected, perhaps because the mainshock rupture loads asperities in adjacent regions.