Tag: <span>terremotos</span>

Hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters obey the same mathematical patterns.

Taking note of the magnitude of various catastrophic natural phenomena and plotting on a graph how many episodes of each of them have occurred throughout history, the result is not unpredictable. Quite the contrary, it follows a very well-defined curve in which, luckily, the greater their devastating capacity, the less frequently they convert.

For example, very few earthquakes become catastrophic, while numerous small earthquakes or earthquakes continually occur that most of them are so weak that they go unnoticed by people and can only be detected by very sensitive instruments. But this information is essential to calculate the associated risks.

However, this dependency is not always the same or conforms to the same mathematical function, particularly with respect to larger events. Álvaro Corral and Álvaro González, researchers from the Center for Mathematical Research (CRM) and the Department of Mathematics of the UAB, have carried out an accurate statistical analysis of a whole set of natural phenomena that can cause disasters: Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Forest fires, Meteorite impacts in the atmosphere, torrential rains and subsidence of the ground.

After analyzing the data of thousands of episodes of different intensity of each one of these phenomena, these researchers have managed to describe with the same mathematical technique the functions that relate the frequency of these phenomena to the value of their magnitude or size. Most of them follow the so-called power law , according to which the events are more and more abundant the smaller they are, without having a “normal” or typical size