Are Seismic Foundation Models More Than Glorified Feature Extractors?

arXiv:2610.38003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Earthquake sequences are stochastic on two separated timescales: the seismic waves of any individual earthquake propagate over seconds to minutes, while the earthquakes themselves arrive as a sparse, self-exciting occurrence process, with inter-event intervals from seconds to months. Respecting both scales in one training objective is the open challenge. Foundation models (FMs) for seismic waveforms instead import their learning targets from audio and vision, where every target is computed from a single fixed-length window. Such a window holds one realization of the wave propagation (an earthquake trace), never the occurrence process that decides when earthquakes happen.