Does the Earth show up an impending mega-earthquake?

Abstract

In line of the intermediate-term monitoring of seismic activity aimed at prediction of the world largest earthquakes the seismic dynamics of the Earth's lithosphere is analysed as a single whole, which is the ultimate scale of the complex hierarchical non-linear system. The present study demonstrates that the lithosphere does behave, at least in intermediate-term scale, as non-linear dynamic system that reveals classical symptoms of instability at the approach of catastrophe, i.e., mega-earthquake. These are: (i) transformation of magnitude distribution, (ii) spatial redistribution of seismic activity, (iii) rise and acceleration of activity, (iv) change of dependencies across magnitudes of different types, and other patterns of collective behaviour. The observed global scale seismic behaviour implies the state of criticality of the Earth lithosphere in the last decade.