On-off intermittency in earthquake occurrence.

The clustered occurrence of earthquakes is viewed as an intermittent phenomenon, interpreting the clusters of events as chaotic bursts combined to the Poissonian occurrence of background seismicity. In particular, we suggest that it can be interpreted as an example of on-off intermittency. This kind of intermittency is parameter driven and exhibits certain universal statistical properties. The study of a Californian catalogue allows to interpret earthquake occurrence as an on-off intermittent phenomenon. Our results suggest the existence of a branching mechanism in earthquake occurrence well explained by epidemic type models.