Abstract
CHINNERY and North1 have used data relating surface wave magnitude to seismic moment, M0, to convert magnitude-frequency statistics for the Earth into a seismic moment distribution. For M0 values ranging from about 2 × 1025 to 2 × 1030 dyne cm they found that their data could be represented by where N is the number of shallow earthquakes (depth < 70 km) each year with seismic moment greater than or equal to M0. On the basis of the remarkably good fit of equation (1) to their data, they argued that seismic moments considerably in excess of 2 × 1030 dyne cm were likely to occur as they did not consider it probable that the linear trend stopped immediately beyond the last data point. I have used recent results on the movement of lithospheric plates in conjunction with equation(1) to estimate an upper limit for M0. It turns out that this upper limit is probably not much in excess of the moment of the Chile earthquake of 1960 ( ∼ 2 × 1030 dyne cm) (ref. 2).
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