Constant Stress Drop from Small to Great Earthquakes in Magnitude-Area Scaling

Abstract Earthquakes span a tremendous range of scales, more than 5 orders of magnitude in length. Are earthquakes fundamentally the same across this huge range of scales, or are the great earthquakes somehow dierent from the small ones? We show that a robust scaling law seen in small earthquakes, with stress drops being independent of earthquake size, indeed holds for great earthquakes as well. The simplest hypothesis, that earthquake stress drops are constant from the smallest to the largest events, combined with a more thorough treatment of the geometrical eects of the nite seismogenic layer depth, gives a new magnitude area scaling which matches the data well, and better over the whole magnitude range than the currently used scaling laws which have non-constant stress drop scaling. This has signicant implications for earthquake physics and for seismic hazard estimates.