Analysis of the refugees’ drowning events :: the earthquakes’ statistics analogy

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the analogy between the refugees’ drownings in the sea and the earthquakes’ occurrences and focus on the aspect that characterizes the statistics of their spatial and temporal successions. The latter is shown to parallel the spatial distribution of consecutive drowning events with the difference that the former exhibits short-range behavior below κ=4km and it is characterized by scale-free statistics, as well as finite size scaling beyond κ=4km, with a critical exponent δ≈ 0.5 , falling within the range of the earthquakes’ δ= 0.6 ± 0.2 , while the distribution of events’ rates exhibits no similarity with that of the earthquakes. Finally, the events’ velocity distribution is also recovered. κ is suspected to be related to the range of mobile network’s coverage and thus effectively represents a cutoff in the ability of picking up signals on drownings in the sea. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.