## 3 Results
### Global Seismicity
#### 3.3.1 Focusing on EQs with M \(\geq\) 8.5  
During the study period, there exist six strong EQs with M \(\geq\) 8.5 as shown in Table 3. They have been preceded within nine months by an equal number of \(\beta_{min}\) (see the first six rows of the last column of Table 3), but the relevant study [60] has also led to three \(\beta_{min}\), which should be considered as FA in the sense discussed in the previous paragraph. In the present case, the six EQ occurrence dates constitute the A type event time-series in ECA, while the nine \(\beta_{min}\) dates correspond to the B type event time-series. Figure 4 depicts the results of ECA and shows that when \(\tau=11\)d and \(\Delta T=255\)d a very small \(p\)-value arises that is p\({}_{G_{1}}=1.19\times 10^{-5}\).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline
**M** & **Latitude (\({}^{\circ}\))** & **Longitude (\({}^{\circ}\))** & **EQ Date** & \(\beta_{min}\)**Date** \\ \hline
7.2 & 25.23 & 39.24 & 1981-12-19 & 1981-07-10 \\
7.2 & 26.32 & 45.55 & 1986-08-30 & 1986-03-07 \\
7.2 & 34.80 & 28.83 & 1995-11-22 & 1995-05-23 \\
7.6 & 29.86 & 40.75 & 1999-08-17 & 1999-03-28 \\
7.1 & 43.51 & 38.72 & 2011-10-23 & 2011-10-04 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: The epicenters and dates of occurrence of the target EQs with M \(\geq\) 7.1 during the study period 1 January 1980 to 25 October 2018 within the area N\({}^{50}_{289}\)E\({}^{44\
u}_{278}\), as reported by the United States National Earthquake Information Center together with the dates of their precursory variability minima (see Table 2 and Section 5 of [62]) (cf. in the EQ catalog the reported magnitude is either mb or \(M_{w}\) with mb being reported [75] for the smaller M(\(<5.5\)) EQs when there is no authoritative \(M_{w}\) available. For small magnitude EQs, however, mb practically equals \(M_{w}\), see Equation (31.II) of [76] and Equation (4) of [65]).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline
**M** & **Latitude (\({}^{\circ}\))** & **Longitude (\({}^{\circ}\))** & **EQ Date** & \(\beta_{min}\)**Date** \\ \hline
9.0 & 3.30 & 95.78 & 2004-12-26 & 2004-04-05 \\
8.6 & 2.09 & 97.11 & 2005-03-28 & 2005-02-02 \\
8.5 & \(-\)4.44 & 101.37 & 2007-09-12 & 2006-12-20 \\
8.8 & \(-\)35.85 & \(-\)72.71 & 2010-02-27 & 2010-02-16 \\
9.1 & 38.32 & 142.37 & 2011-03-11 & 2010-11-30 \\
8.6 & 2.33 & 93.06 & 2012-04-11 & 2011-08-04 \\  & & & & 2008-08-25 \\  & & & & 2012-06-03 \\  & & & & 2014-01-13 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: The epicenters and dates of occurrence of all EQs with M \(\geq\) 8.5 during the study period 1 January 1976 to 1 October 2014 as reported by the Global Centroid Moment Tensor Catalog together with the dates of their precursory variability minima. In the last three rows, we also include the dates of three more variability minima that could not be separated from the precursory ones (see Table 2 in [60]).  
Figure 4: Results of ECA for the study [60] of the global seismicity for \(M_{\text{ll}}\geq 8.5\): The colour scales in each panel correspond to (**A**) the precursor coincidence rate and (**B**) the precursor \(p\)-value which were obtained by applying CoinCalc[3] for various values of \(\tau\) and \(\Delta T\). The rectangles in each case indicate the region of \(\tau\) and \(\Delta T\) at which our study is focused in (**C**). The latter panel is the same as (**B**) in expanded (time) scale.