The Harvard Global CMT catalogue from 1977 to 1998 is analyzed to investigate the relation between the centroid depth and the hypocentral depth. It is observed that for shallow earthquakes, the hypocentral depth is systematically larger than the centroid depth, while for deep_focus earthquakes there is no statistically significant difference between the distributions of centroid and hypocentral depth. A detailed look at the result reveals that such a systematic difference is mainly from the contribution of thrust and normal earthquakes, while strike_slip earthquakes have no such regularity. It turns out that for shallow thrust and normal earthquakes, seismic rupture tends to initiate from the deeper part.
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