A Statistical Study of Mid-Atlantic Ridge Earthquakes

Summary A statistical study of Mid-Atlantic Ridge earthquakes has been made. The cumulative distributions of time and distance intervals between consecutive events can be explained by assuming a proportion of earthquakes to be random and the remainder to be clustering. The same proportion fits both time and distance distributions. The proportion of earthquakes found to cluster depends on the sensitivity of the network, but is greater along the rift areas than along the major fracture zones. The smaller an event, the more likely it is to be part of a cluster and not random.