We monitor the stick-slip displacements of a very slowly driven moveable perforated top plate which interacts via shearing with a packing of identical glass beads confined in a tray. When driven at a constant stress rate, the distributions of large event displacements and energies triggered by the stick-slip instabilities exhibit power law responses reminiscent of the Gutenberg-Richter law for earthquakes. Small events are quasi-size independent, signaling crossover from single-bead transport to collective behavior.
The Drossel-Schwabl model of forest fires can be interpreted in a coarse grained sense as a model for the stress distribution in a single planar fault. Fires in the model are then translated to earthquakes. I show that when a second class of trees that propagate fire only after some finite time is introduced in the model, secondary fires (analogous to aftershocks) are generated, and the statistics of events becomes quantitatively compatible with the Gutenberg Richter law for earthquakes, with a realistic value of the $b$ exponent. The change in exponent is analytically demonstrated in a simpli…
We introduce a new model for an earthquake fault system that is composed of non-interacting simple lattice models with different levels of damage denoted by $q$. The undamaged lattice models ($q=0$) have Gutenberg-Richter scaling with a cumulative exponent $β=1/2$, whereas the damaged models do not have well defined scaling. However, if we consider the "fault system" consisting of all models, damaged and undamaged, we get excellent scaling with the exponent depending on the relative frequency with which faults with a particular amount of damage occur in the fault system. This paradigm combines…
The Gutenberg-Richter power law distribution of earthquake sizes is one of the most famous example illustrating self-similarity. It is well-known that the Gutenberg-Richter distribution has to be modified for large seismic moments, due to energy conservation and geometrical reasons. Several models have been proposed, either in terms of a second power law with a larger b-value beyond a cross-over magnitude, or based on a ``hard'' magnitude cut-off or a ``soft'' magnitude cut-off using an exponential taper. Since the large scale tectonic deformation is dominated by the very largest earthquakes a…
The statistics of earthquakes in a heterogeneous fault zone is studied analytically and numerically in the mean field version of a model for a segmented fault system in a three-dimensional elastic solid. The studies focus on the interplay between the roles of disorder, dynamical effects, and driving mechanisms. A two-parameter phase diagram is found, spanned by the amplitude of dynamical weakening (or ``overshoot'') effects (epsilon) and the normal distance (L) of the driving forces from the fault. In general, small epsilon and small L are found to produce Gutenberg-Richter type power law stat…
We present a quantitative statistical test for the presence of a crossover c0 in the Gutenberg-Richter distribution of earthquake seismic moments, separating the usual power law regime for seismic moments less than c0 from another faster decaying regime beyond c0. Our method is based on the transformation of the ordered sample of seismic moments into a series with uniform distribution under condition of no crossover. The bootstrap method allows us to estimate the statistical significance of the null hypothesis H0 of an absence of crossover (c0=infinity). When H0 is rejected, we estimate the cr…
Prediction in complex systems at criticality is believed to be very difficult, if not impossible. Of particular interest is whether earthquakes, whose distribution follows a power law (Gutenberg-Richter) distribution, are in principle unpredictable. We study the predictability of event sizes in the Olmai-Feder-Christensen model at different proximities to criticality using a convolutional neural network. The distribution of event sizes satisfies a power law with a cutoff for large events. We find that prediction decreases as criticality is approached and that prediction is possible only for la…
Very often damage and fracture in heterogeneous materials exhibit bursty dynamics made of successive impulse-like events which form characteristic aftershock sequences obeying specific scaling laws initially derived in seismology: Gutenberg-Richter law, productivity law, Båth's law and Omori-Utsu law. We show here how these laws naturally arise in the model of the long-range elastic depinning interface used as a paradigm to model crack propagation in heterogeneous media. We unravel the specific conditions required to observe this seismic-like organization in the crack propagation problem. Beyo…
We show that the distribution of waiting times between earthquakes occurring in California obeys a simple unified scaling law valid from tens of seconds to tens of years, see Eq. (1) and Fig. 4. The short time clustering, commonly referred to as aftershocks, is nothing but the short time limit of the general hierarchical properties of earthquakes. There is no unique operational way of distinguishing between main shocks and aftershocks. In the unified law, the Gutenberg-Richter b-value, the exponent -1 of the Omori law for aftershocks, and the fractal dimension d_f of earthquakes appear as crit…
The statistical properties of avalanches in a dissipative particulate system under slow shear are investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. It is found that the magnitude-frequency distribution obeys the Gutenberg-Richter law only in the proximity of a critical density and that the exponent is sensitive to the minute changes in density. It is also found that aftershocks occur in this system with a decay rate that follows the Modified Omori law. We show that the exponent of the magnitude-frequency distribution and the time constant of the Modified Omori law are decreasing functions of …
We show that there is a common mode of origin for the power laws observed in two different models: (i) the Pareto law for the distribution of money among the agents with random saving propensities in an ideal gas-like market model and (ii) the Gutenberg-Richter law for the distribution of overlaps in a fractal-overlap model for earthquakes. We find that the power laws appear as the asymptotic forms of ever-widening log-normal distributions for the agents' money and the overlap magnitude respectively. The identification of the generic origin of the power laws helps in better understanding and i…
We study earthquake interval time statistics, paying special attention to inter-occurrence times in the two-dimensional (2D) stick-slip (block-slider) model. Inter-occurrence times are the time interval between successive earthquakes on all faults in a region. We select stiffness and friction parameters as tunable parameters because these physical quantities are considered as essential factors in describing fault dynamics. It is found that inter-occurrence time statistics depend on the parameters. Varying stiffness and friction parameters systematically, we optimize these parameters so as to r…
We address several questions on the behavior of a numerical model recently introduced to study seismic phenomena, that includes relaxation in the plates as a key ingredient. We make an analysis of the scaling of the largest events with system size, and show that when parameters are appropriately interpreted, the typical size of the largest events scale as the system size, without the necessity to tune any parameter. Secondly, we show that the temporal activity in the model is inherently non-stationary, and obtain from here justification and support for the concept of a "seismic cycle" in the t…
Motivated by the fact that empirical time series of earthquakes exhibit long-range correlations in space and time and the Gutenberg-Richter distribution of magnitudes, we propose a simple fault model that can account for these types of scale-invariance. It is an avalanching process that displays power-laws in the event sizes, in the epicenter distances as well as in the waiting-time distributions, and also aftershock rates obeying a generalized Omori law. We thus confirm that there is a relation between temporal and spatial clustering of the activity in this kind of models. The fluctuating bou…
We have numerically investigated statistical properties of the so-called interoccurrence time or the waiting time, i.e., the time interval between successive earthquakes, based on the two-dimensional (2-D) spring-block (Burridge-Knopoff) model, selecting the velocity-weakening property as the constitutive friction law. The statistical properties of frequency distribution and the cumulative distribution of the interoccurrence time are discussed by tuning the dynamical parameters, namely, a stiffness and frictional property of a fault. We optimize these model parameters to reproduce the interocc…
The nature of the high-speed rupture or the main shock of the Burridge-Knopoff spring-block model in two dimensions obeying the rate-and-state dependent friction law is studied by means of extensive computer simulations. It is found that the rupture propagation in larger events is highly anisotropic and irregular in shape on longer length scales, although the model is completely uniform and the rupture-propagation velocity is kept constant everywhere at the rupture front. The manner of the rupture propagation sometimes mimics the successive ruptures of neighboring "asperities" observed in real…
The `plate tectonics' is an observed fact and most models of earthquake incorporate that through the frictional dynamics (stick-slip) of two surfaces where one surface moves over the other. These models are more or less successful to reproduce the well known Gutenberg-Richter type power law in the (released) energy distribution of earthquakes. During sticking period, the elastic energy gets stored at the contact area of the surfaces and is released when a slip occurs. Therefore, the extent of the contact area between two surfaces plays an important role in the earthquake dynamics and the power…
We consider a general stochastic branching process, which is relevant to earthquakes as well as to many other systems, and we study the distributions of the total number of offsprings (direct and indirect aftershocks in seismicity) and of the total number of generations before extinction. We apply our results to a branching model of triggered seismicity, the ETAS (epidemic-type aftershock sequence) model. The ETAS model assumes that each earthquake can trigger other earthquakes (``aftershocks''). An aftershock sequence results in this model from the cascade of aftershocks of each past earthqua…
The epidemic-type aftershock sequence model (ETAS) is a simple stochastic process modeling seismicity, based on the two best-established empirical laws, the Omori law (power law decay ~1/t^{1+θ} of seismicity after an earthquake) and Gutenberg-Richter law (power law distribution of earthquake energies). In order to describe also the space distribution of seismicity, we use in addition a power law distribution ~1/r^{1+μ} of distances between triggered and triggering earthquakes. We present an exact mapping between the ETAS model and a class of CTRW (continuous time random walk) models, based on…
Based on recent results in extreme value theory, we use a new technique for the statistical estimation of distribution tails. Specifically, we use the Gnedenko-Pickands-Balkema-de Haan theorem, which gives a natural limit law for peak-over-threshold values in the form of the Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD). Useful in finance, insurance, hydrology, we investigate here the earthquake energy distribution described by the Gutenberg-Richter seismic moment-frequency law and analyze shallow earthquakes (depth h < 70 km) in the Harvard catalog over the period 1977-2000 in 18 seismic zones. The w…
The current understanding of the earthquake interevent times distribution (ITD) is incomplete. The Weibull distribution is often used to model the earthquake ITD. We link the earthquake ITD on single faults with the Earth's crustal shear strength distribution by means of a phenomenological stick - slip model. We obtain Weibull ITD for power-law stress accumulation, i.e., $σ(t) = αt^β$, where $β>0$ for single faults or systems with homogeneous strength statistics. We show that logarithmic stress accumulation leads to the log-Weibull ITD. For the Weibull ITD, we prove that (i) $m= βm_s$, where $…
