Philippe Danré, Jiuxun Yin, Bradley Lipovsky, Marine Denolle

Earthquake source time functions carry information about the complexity of seismic rupture. We explore databases of source time functions of earthquakes and find that source time functions are composed of distinct peaks that we call subevents. We observe that earthquake complexity, as represented by the number of subevents, grows with earthquake magnitude. We find that subevent magnitudes are nearly proportional to their corresponding main event magnitude. We show that the main event magnitude can be estimated after observing only the first few subevents.