What is the relationship between the strength and frequency of earthquakes?

Answer 1

In the study of seismology, the Gutenberg-Richter law addresses the relationship between magnitude and frequency of earthquakes. Size is definitely a factor with large earthquakes appearing less frequently than smaller or mid sized quakes which can occur much more often.

Answer 2

Not much, depending on what you mean by "frequency."

It's rather like plucking a guitar string. You can pluck it a little, in which you get a weak sound- "low magnitude--" or you can pluck it as hard as you can, to get a loud sound, "high magnitude." But you get the same basic frequency. It's much the same with earthquakes, with the waveform generated depending mostly on the shape, location, and orientation of the chunk of fault line that ruptured. Of course if you pluck a guitar string hard as you can you can hear overtones and such that you wouldn't notice if you plucked the string gently. Likewise, you can see details in the waveform of a large earthquake that you just wouldn't see in a small one.

When people talk about earthquake magnitude vs. frequency they are usually talking about the magnitude of the earthquake vs. how often the earthquakes occur. In that case, the smaller the earthquake the more often you get them. This is evident in some of the California earthquake areas; you have regions where they have earthquakes all the time, but never a big one. While another nearby area has only a few earthquakes, but they're big. What's happening is that the same total amount of shift is being released in both places, but in one place it's being released a little all the time. In the other the fault is "locked" and builds up a huge amount of energy before it finally lets go.

Answer 3

In the study of seismology, the Gutenberg-Richter law addresses the relationship between magnitude and frequency of earthquakes. Size is definitely a factor with large earthquakes appearing less frequently than smaller or mid sized quakes which can occur much more often.

Answer 4

If by frequency you mean number of occurrences per unit time, then there is an inverse relationship whereby the larger the magnitude of the earthquake, the smaller the frequency of occurrence.

However if you are referring to the amplitude and frequency of the seismic waves themselves there is no direct correlation. Instead this is dependent on the material through which the waves are propagating as different materials will attenuate (reduce the amplitude of) seismic waves by differing amounts and this in turn tends to be dependent on the frequency of the wave (as some materials will allow waves of certain frequencies to pass with very little change in amplitude whereas waves with other frequencies will undergo large reductions in their amplitude).

Answer 5

There is really no relationship between the two, the distance is only the strength of the seismic wave either the primary wave, secondary wave, or the surface wave. The depth is only the focus of the earthquake, meaning where the earthquake started.

Answer 6

magnitude is the size or amount of energy an earthquake produces and has no connection to how often earthquakes occur

Answer 7

It's the amount of energy released during earthquakes.