Precarious trajectories: How far away is the next refugee drowning?

Ashod Khederlarian; Martin Grant; Monika Halkort; Sara Najem

Precarious trajectories: How far away is the next refugee drowning?

Physics and Society 2020-10-20 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Authors: Ashod Khederlarian , Martin Grant , Monika Halkort , Sara Najem

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the analogy between the refugees' drownings in the sea and the earthquakes' occurrences and focus on the aspect that characterizes the statistics of their spatial and temporal successions. The former is shown to parallel the spatial distribution of consecutive drowning events with the difference that the latter exhibits short-range behavior below $\kappa = 4km$ and it is characterized by scale-free statistics, with a critical exponent $\delta \approx 0.5$ , falling within the range of the earthquakes' $\delta = 0.65 \pm 0.20$ , as well as finite size scaling beyond $\kappa = 4km$ , while the distribution of events' rates exhibits no similarity with that of the earthquakes. Finally, the events' velocity distribution is also recovered. $\kappa$ is suspected to be related to the radar and mobile network's coverage ranges and thus effectively represents a cut-off in the ability of picking up signals on drownings in the sea.

Keywords

refugee drowning earthquake analogy scale-free statistics spatial-temporal succession finite size scaling critical exponent

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.07148,
  title  = {Precarious trajectories: How far away is the next refugee drowning?},
  author = {Ashod Khederlarian and Martin Grant and Monika Halkort and Sara Najem},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.07148},
  year   = {2020}
}

Precarious trajectories: How far away is the next refugee drowning?

Abstract

Keywords

Cite

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