Power-laws and applications to earthquake populations

In this paper we study the rooted tree model applying the concepts of probability to obtain results of importance in understanding power-law distributions in pure populations and also in an ensemble of pure populations. The well-known Gutenberg-Richter relation, which is an empirical relation providing the number of earthquakes whose magnitude exceeds a given value, is shown to be an asymptotic form of survivor function of earthquake magnitudes. The implications of this model are briefly discussed in relation to other branches of sciences where power-law distributions are encountered.