Dipartimento di Fisica, University of Bologna, Alma Mater Studiorum,

The aim of this paper is to provide some constrains on the time behavior of earthquake generation mechanism, through the usage of a non-parametric statistics that leads up to the empirical estimation of the hazard function. The results indicate that the most characterizing temporal feature for large (M 7.0+) worldwide shallow earthquake occurrence is a clustering lasting few years, indicating that the probability of earthquake occurrence is higher immediately after the occurrence of an event. After that, the process becomes almost time independent, as in a Poisson process. Remarkably, this time clustering is very similar to what previously found for different spatio-magnitude windows, and it does not seem to depend on the tectonic style of the region. This may support the hypothesis of an universal law for earthquake occurrence.