The largest aftershock: How strong, how far away, how delayed?

[1] Proposed in the 1950's, Bath's law states that the largest aftershock has a magnitude that is typically 1.2 less than that of the mainshock. Thirty years of the global earthquake catalog allow us to extend Bath's law in time, space and focal mechanism. On average, reverse faults have a smaller magnitude and distance from the mainshock to largest aftershock than strike-slip faults. The distribution of the time intervals between mainshocks and their largest aftershocks obeys power law, but with a somewhat faster rate of decay than for aftershocks, in general. This implies that the largest aftershocks are more likely to occur earlier rather than later in a given sequence of aftershocks.

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