Universal local versus unified global scaling laws in the statistics of seismicity

The unified scaling law for earthquakes, proposed by Bak, Christensen, Danon and Scanlon, is shown to hold worldwide, as well as for areas as diverse as Japan, New Zealand, Spain or New Madrid. The scaling functions that account for the rescaled recurrence-time probability densities show a power-law behavior for long times, with a universal exponent about (minus) 2.2. Another decreasing power law governs short times, but with an exponent that may change from one area to another. This is in contrast with a local, time-homogenized version of Bak et al.'s procedure, which seems to present a universal scaling behavior. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.