AN ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO FOR EARTHQUAKE PREDICTION EXPERIMENTS

Current earthquake prediction experiments investigate behaviour before potentially large earthquakes. There is some evidence that comparatively small typical events in isolated swarms of earthquakes may have precursory behaviour similar to that before much larger earthquakes in more complicated areas of seismicity. Such typical events in isolated swarms frequently recur with similar magnitudes in similar locations with repetition times sometimes as little as a few days. It is argued that monitoring such typical events in isolated swarms could be an effective way to gain experience of precursory activity, and might well be a good guide for investigations of precursors to large earthquakes.