Origin and Nonuniversality of the Earthquake Interevent Time Distribution

Many authors have modeled regional earthquake interevent times using a gamma distribution, whereby data collapse occurs under a simple rescaling of the data from different regions or time periods. We show, using earthquake data and simulations, that the distribution is fundamentally a bimodal mixture distribution dominated by correlated aftershocks at short waiting times and independent events at longer times. The much-discussed power-law segment often arises as a crossover between these two. We explain the variation of the distribution with region size and show that it is not universal.