Natural disasters like forest fires and earthquakes have more than just havoc-reeking, destructive natures in common, according to scientist Eduardo Jagla of the National Atomic Energy Commission in Argentina. In a paper to appear in the APS journal, Physical Review Letters , Jagla found that a statistical model describing the behavior of forest fires could be used to characterize the decay rate of earthquakes. The number of earthquakes that can occur in a given region over a period of time follows a surprisingly simple logarithmic scale expressed by the Gutenberg-Richter Law. The law takes into account the magnitude of an earthquake, the seismicity rate of the region in question and a constant, called the b-value. Although the b-value hovers around one (give or take 0.5) for most regions, scientists do not fully understand why one is the magic number. The b-value satisfies observational experiments that follow the GR law, but its origin remains unknown. Jagla proposed that afters
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