EARTHQUAKE SCALING PARADOX

Two measures of earthquakes, the seismic moment and the broadband radiated energy, show completely different scaling relations. For shallow earthquakes worldwide from January 1987 to December 1998, the frequency distribution of the seismic moment shows a clear kink between moderate and large earthquakes, as revealed by previous works. But the frequency distribution of the broadband radiated energy shows a single power law, a classical Gutenberg-Richter relation. This inconsistency raises a paradox in the self-organized criticality model of earthquakes.