The distribution of Voronoi cells generated by Southern California earthquake epicenters

The cells of Voronoi diagrams generated by epicentral locations Of Southern California earthquakes are inspected. The tapered Pareto distribution is shown to fit quite well to the distribution of cell areas and perimeters. This same distribution, which has been used to model the distribution of seismic moments, is also a close approximation to the empirical distributions of times and distances between Successive earthquakes for the same catalog of Southern California events. Verification is performed using a variety of different windows and sub-sampling procedures in order to confirm that the results are not an artifact of the particular parameters of the selected earthquake catalog. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.