Background Seismicity and Its Application to Seismic Hazard Assessment in the North China Region

The historical earthquake activity is intense in the North China region. However, no middle-sized earthquakes have occurred in the last decades in the region since the MS6.2 earthquake in the Zhangbei region in 1998. The quiescence of moderate and strong earthquakes is quite prominent in North China. In this paper, we use small earthquake records in 1970~2009 to study background seismic activity in the North China region. The spatial distributions of seismic parameters are presented, including b-value, the ...