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

• Main Authors: Khederlarian, Ashod, Grant, Martin, Halkort, Monika, Najem, Sara
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 17.08.2020
• Subjects: Physics - Physics and Society; Physics - Statistical Mechanics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2008.07148

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.