Power-law size distributions in geoscience revisited

Understand

The size or energy of diverse structures or phenomena in geoscience appears to follow power-law distributions.

• A rigorous statistical analysis of such observations is tricky, though.
• Observables can span several orders of magnitude, but the range for which the power law may be valid is typically truncated, usually because the smallest events are too tiny to be detected and the largest ones are limited by the system size.
• We revisit several examples of proposed power-law distributions dealing with potentially damaging natural phenomena.