Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2021) 136: 619
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01616-4

Regular Article

Analysis of the refugees’ drowning events:

the earthquakes’ statistics analogy

¹ Physics Department, American University of Beirut, 1107 2020, Beirut, Lebanon
² Physics Department, McGill University, Rutherford Building, 3600 Rue University, H3A 2T8, Montréal, Québec, Canada
³ Department of Communication Arts, Lebanese American University, 1102 2801, Chouran Beirut, Lebanon

^d sn62@aub.edu.lb

Received: 1 March 2021
Accepted: 26 May 2021
Published online: 2 June 2021

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 latter is shown to parallel the spatial distribution of consecutive drowning events with the difference that the former exhibits short-range behavior below $\kappa =4\mathrm{km}$ and it is characterized by scale-free statistics, as well as finite size scaling beyond $\kappa =4\mathrm{km}$, with a critical exponent $\delta \approx 0.5$, falling within the range of the earthquakes’ $\delta =0.6\pm 0.2$, 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 range of mobile network’s coverage and thus effectively represents a cutoff in the ability of picking up signals on drownings in the sea.