James H. Dieterich

Career Dieterich spent most of his career at USGS/Menlo Park. In October 1983 Dieterich made a trip to Costa Rica to evaluate recent University of California, Santa Cruz earthquake prediction models. His research, published in both his 1994 paper A constitutive law for rate of earthquake production and its application to earthquake clustering and his 1996 paper with Brian D. Kilgore entitled Implications of fault constitutive properties for earthquake prediction, theorized that the magnitude of a given earthquake and the rate of follow-on aftershocks occurred in inverse proportion, meaning that stronger earthquakes have fewer aftershocks. A study published in 2002 by Shinji Toda et al., addressing an earthquake swarm at the Izu Islands in 2000, confirms Dieterich's hypothesis. In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Publications