Is Earthquake Triggering Driven by Small Earthquakes?

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Abstract
Using a catalog of seismicity for Southern California, we measure how the number of triggered earthquakes increases with the earthquake magnitude. The trade-off between this relation and the distribution of earthquake magnitudes controls the relative role of small compared to large earthquakes. We show that seismicity triggering is driven by the smallest earthquakes, which trigger fewer events than larger earthquakes, but which are much more numerous. We propose that the nontrivial scaling of the number of triggered earthquakes emerges from the fractal spatial distribution of seismicity.