Evidence for diurnal periodicity of earthquakes from midnight to daybreak

Previously, inadequate earthquake catalogs and the lack of method made it challenging, if not impossible, to determine the dominant period of earthquake occurrence. With the advent of densely distributed seismic stations in Japan since 2002, 410 642 M1.0+ earthquakes have been cataloged under the mainland within 30-km depth, which provide a superb dataset to identify the periodicity of earthquakes. We processed this catalog using time-frequency analyses and daily stacking, which are powerful in extracting weak periodical signal from strong random noises. We concentrated on the time sector from 0:00 to 6:00 (i.e. from midnight to daybreak), which is a reliable time window for much higher detectability of weak earthquakes, since it has the lowest affects from cultural noises. We successfully observed two apparent periodicities of 12- and 24-hour, which are much smaller than the fortnightly periodicity presented previously in the literature. Synthetic earth tides, after intentionally ignoring the contribution from the Moon, present similar dominant periods as the earthquakes. This may indicate that the dominant period of earthquakes is statistically associated with the Sun rather than the Moon. The daily stacking number of earthquakes using a 15-minute or 1-hour interval shows a peak around 1:30, rather than usually expected 3:00 to 4:00. In addition, bigger earthquakes show more evident variations in the stacking results, and the trend is very consistent for various lower limits of earthquake magnitude from M1.0 to M4.0. These discoveries settled the disputes on the existence of the periodicity of earthquakes since 1886 and may open a window to unravel the mystery of earthquakes.