The apparent paradox of exponentially distributed inter-earthquake intervals

On a global scale, large earthquakes are Poisson-distributed in time which implies that the inter-earthquake intervals are exponentially distributed. Thus, a simple-minded estimation of the most probable interval could conclude that the most probable occurrence time for a large earthquake would be now! This thesis is unsupported by observations. The apparent paradox is explained when characteristics of the interval cumulative distributions are explored for different seismicity rates. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015