The scaling relation derived by Dorogovtsev, Goltsev, Mendes and Samukhin [Phys. Rev. E, 68 (2003) 046109] states that the exponents of the power-law connectivity distribution, gamma, and the power-law eigenvalue distribution of the adjacency matrix, delta, of a locally treelike scale-free network satisfy 2*gamma - delta = 1 in the mean field approximation. Here, it is shown that this relation holds well for the reduced simple earthquake networks (without tadpole-loops and multiple edges) constructed from the seismic data taken from California and Japan. The result is interpreted from the viewpoint of the hierarchical organization of the earthquake networks.
The statistical properties of earthquake aftershocks are studied. The scaling relation for the exponents of the Omori law and the power-law calm time distribution (i.e., the interoccurrence time distribution), which is valid if a sequence of aftershocks is a singular Markovian process, is carefully examined. Data analysis shows significant violation of the scaling relation, implying the non-Markovian nature of aftershocks.
Spatial distances between subsequent earthquakes in southern California exhibit scale-free statistics, with a critical exponent $δ\approx 0.6$, as well as finite size scaling. The statistics are independent of the threshold magnitude as long as the catalog is complete, but depend strongly on the temporal ordering of events, rather than the geometry of the spatial epicenter distribution. Nevertheless, the spatial distance and waiting time between subsequent earthquakes are uncorrelated with each other. These observations contradict the theory of aftershock zone scaling with main shock magnitude…
Natural earthquake fault systems are highly non-homogeneous. The inhomogeneities occur be- cause the earth is made of a variety of materials which hold and dissipate stress differently. In this work, we study scaling in earthquake fault models which are variations of the Olami-Feder- Christensen (OFC) and Rundle-Jackson-Brown (RJB) models. We use the scaling to explore the effect of spatial inhomogeneities due to damage and inhomogeneous stress dissipation in the earthquake-fault-like systems when the stress transfer range is long, but not necessarily longer than the length scale associated wi…
After a large earthquake, the likelihood of successive strong aftershocks needs to be estimated. Exploiting similarities with critical phenomena, we introduce a scaling law for the decay in time following a main shock of the expected number of aftershocks greater than a certain magnitude. Empirical results that support our scaling hypothesis are obtained from analyzing the record of earthquakes in California. The proposed form unifies the well-known Omori and Gutenberg-Richter laws of seismicity, together with other phenomenological observations. Our results substantially modify presently empl…
One of the main interests in seismology is the formulation of models able to describe the clustering in time occurrence of earthquakes. Analysis of the Southern California Catalog shows magnitude clustering in correspondence to temporal clustering. Here we propose a dynamical scaling hypothesis in which time is rescaled in terms of magnitude. This hypothesis is introduced in the context of a generalized trigger model and gives account for clustering in time and magnitude for earthquake occurrence. The model is able to generate a synthetic catalog reproducing magnitude and inter-even time distr…
Applying Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) to the geomagnetic data recorded at three measuring stations in Japan, Rong et al. in 2012 reported that anomalous magnetic field variations were identified well before the occurrence of the disastrous Tohoku $M_w$9.0 earthquake that occurred on 11 March 2011 in Japan exhibiting increased "non-uniform" scaling behavior. Here, we provide an explanation for the appearance of this increase of "non-uniform" scaling on the following grounds: These magnetic field variations are the ones that accompany the electric field variations termed Seismic Electric…
Waiting-time statistics are generated from the Olami-Feder-Christensen model and shown to mimic some aspects of real seismicity. Preliminary analysis of the model data implies a recently proposed universal scaling law for the distribution in seismicity may be due to a mixing between aftershocks and uncorrelated event pairs, thus having limited application. Earthquake catalog data is also presented to support the argument.
Over the past decades much effort has been devoted towards understanding and forecasting natural hazards. However, earthquake forecasting skill is still very limited and remains a great scientific challenge. The limited earthquake predictability is partly due to the erratic nature of earthquakes and partly to the lack of understanding the underlying mechanisms of earthquakes. To improve our understanding and potential forecasting, here we study the spatial and temporal long-term memory of interevent earthquakes above a certain magnitude using lagged conditional probabilities. We find, in real …
It has been observed that the earthquake events possess short-term memory, i.e. that events occurring in a particular location are dependent on the short history of that location. We conduct an analysis to see whether real-time earthquake data also possess long-term memory and, if so, whether such autocorrelations depend on the size of earthquakes within close spatiotemporal proximity. We analyze the seismic waveform database recorded by 64 stations in Japan, including the 2011 "Great East Japan Earthquake", one of the five most powerful earthquakes ever recorded which resulted in a tsunami an…
Event counts are a powerful diagnostic for earthquake analysis. We report on a bimodal distribution of earthquake event counts in the U.S. since 2013. The new peak is about a magnitude M1 with a distribution very similar to that of induced earthquakes in Groningen, The Netherlands, characterized by exponential growth in event count since 2001. The latter shows a doubling time of 6.24 years with a relatively constant rate of land subsidence. We model its internal shear stresses as a function of dimensionless curvature and illustrate the resulting exponential growth in a tabletop crack formation…
The relation between seismic moment and fractured area is crucial to earthquake hazard analysis. Experimental catalogs show multiple scaling behaviors, with some controversy concerning the exponent value in the large earthquake regime. Here, we show that the original Olami, Feder, and Christensen model does not capture experimental findings. Taking into account heterogeneous friction, the visco elastic nature of faults together with finite-size effects, we are able to reproduce the different scaling regimes of field observations. We provide an explanation for the origin of the two crossovers b…
We show that Bak et al.'s unified scaling law cannot be trivially explained by a single Omori aftershock sequence. On the contrary, the spatial heterogeneity of seismicity plays a fundamental role in the unified scaling law, which implies that the law provides a way to quantify seismic patterns in space.
A measure of the correlation between two earthquakes is used to link events to their aftershocks, generating a growing network structure. In this framework one can quantify whether an aftershock is close or far, from main shocks of all magnitudes. We find that simple network motifs involving links to far aftershocks appear frequently before the three biggest earthquakes of the last 16 years in Southern California. Hence, networks could be useful to detect symptoms typically preceding major events.
In the quest to determine fault weakening processes that govern earthquake mechanics, it is common to infer the earthquake breakdown energy from seismological measurements. Breakdown energy is observed to scale with slip, which is often attributed to enhanced fault weakening with continued slip or at high slip rates, possibly caused by flash heating and thermal pressurization. However, breakdown energy varies by more than six orders of magnitude, which is physically irreconcilable with prevailing material properties. We present a dynamic model that demonstrates that breakdown energy scaling ca…
A recently proposed unified scaling law for interoccurrence times of earthquakes [P. Bak et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 88}, 178501 (2002)] is analyzed, both theoretically and with data from Southern California. We decompose the corresponding probability density into local-instantaneous distributions, which scale with the rate of earthquake occurrence. The fluctuations of the rate, characterizing the non-stationarity of the process, show a doubly power-law distribution and are fundamental to determine the overall behavior, described by a double power law as well.
Earthquake network is known to be of the small-world type. The values of the network characteristics, however, depend not only on the cell size (i.e., the scale of coarse graining needed for constructing the network) but also on the size of a seismic data set. Here, discovery of a scaling law for the clustering coefficient in terms of the data size, which is refereed to here as finite data-size scaling, is reported. Its universality is shown to be supported by the detailed analysis of the data taken from California, Japan and Iran. Effects of setting threshold of magnitude are also discussed.
Scaling analysis reveals striking regularities in earthquake occurrence. The time between any one earthquake and that following it is random, but it is described by the same universal-probability distribution for any spatial region and magnitude range considered. When time is expressed in rescaled units, set by the averaged seismic activity, the self-similar nature of the process becomes apparent. The form of the probability distribution reveals that earthquakes tend to cluster in time, beyond the duration of aftershock sequences. Furthermore, if aftershock sequences are analysed in an analogo…
We explore in depth the validity of a recently proposed scaling law for earthquake interevent time distributions in the case of the Southern California, using the waveform cross-correlation catalog of Shearer et al. Two statistical tests are used: on the one hand, the standard two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is in agreement with the scaling of the distributions. On the other hand, the one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic complemented with Monte Carlo simulation of the inter-event times, as done by Clauset et al., supports the validity of the gamma distribution as a simple model of the sc…
This paper presents an explanation of a possible mechanism underlying the shape of the universal curve of Scaling Law for Earthquake Recurrence Time Distributions. The presented simple stochastic cellular automaton model is reproducing the gamma distribution fit with the proper value of the parameter $γ$ characterizing Earth's seismicity and also imitates a deviation from the fit at the short interevent times, as observed in real data. Thus the model suggests an explanation of the universal pattern of rescaled Earthquake Recurrence Time Distributions in terms of combinatorial rules for accumul…
The interevent time distribution characterizes the temporal occurrence in seismic catalogs. Universal scaling properties of this distribution have been evidenced for entire catalogs and seismic sequences. Recently, these universal features have been questioned and some criticisms have been raised. We investigate the existence of universal scaling properties by analyzing a Californian catalog and by means of numerical simulations of an epidemic-type model. We show that the interevent time distribution exhibits a universal behavior over the entire temporal range if four characteristic times are …
Earthquake network captures the complexity of seismicity in a peculiar manner. Given a seismic data, the procedure of constructing an earthquake network proposed in [S. Abe, N, Suzuki, Europhys. Lett. 65 (2004) 581] contains as a single parameter the size of the cells, into which a geographical region under consideration is divided. Then, the characteristics of the network depend on the cell size, in general. Here, the dependency of the clustering coefficient, C, of network on the cell size is studied. Remarkably, C of the earthquake networks constructed from the seismic data taken from Califo…
Earthquake phenomenology exhibits a number of power law distributions including the Gutenberg-Richter frequency-size statistics and the Omori law for aftershock decay rates. In search for a basic model that renders correct predictions on long spatio-temporal scales, we discuss results associated with a heterogeneous fault with long range stress-transfer interactions. To better understand earthquake dynamics we focus on faults with Gutenberg-Richter like earthquake statistics and develop two universal scaling functions as a stronger test of the theory against observations than mere scaling expo…
Using a catalog of seismicity for Southern California, we measure how the number of triggered earthquakes increases with the earthquake magnitude. The trade-off between this relation and the distribution of earthquake magnitudes controls the relative role of small compared to large earthquakes. We show that seismicity triggering is driven by the smallest earthquakes, which trigger fewer events than larger earthquakes, but which are much more numerous. We propose that the non-trivial scaling of the number of triggered earthquakes emerges from the fractal spatial distribution of seismicity.
Decades of seismological observations have highlighted the variability of foreshock occurrence prior to natural earthquakes, making thus difficult to track how earthquakes start. Here, we report on three stick-slip experiments performed on cylindrical samples of Indian metagabbro under upper crustal stress conditions (30-60 $MPa$). Acoustic emissions (AEs) were continuously recorded by 8 calibrated acoustic sensors during the experiments. Seismological parameters (moment magnitude, corner frequency and stress-drop) of the detected AEs ($-8.8 \leq Mw \leq -7 $) follow the scaling law between mo…
By analyzing a southern California earthquake catalog, Davidsen and Paczuski [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 048501 (2005)] claim to have found evidence contradicting the theory of aftershock zone scaling in favor of scale-free statistics. We present four elements showing that Davidsen and Paczuski's results may be insensitive to the existence of physical length scales associated with aftershock zones or mainshock rupture lengths, so that their claim is unsubstantiated. (i) Their exponent smaller than 1 for a pdf implies that the power law statistics they report is at best an intermediate asymptotic; (i…
The phenomenon of aftershocks is studied in view of science of complexity. In particular, three different concepts are examined: (i) the complex-network representation of seismicity, (ii) the event-event correlations, and (iii) the effects of long-range memory. Regarding (i), it is shown the clustering coefficient of the complex earthquake network exhibits a peculiar behavior at and after main shocks. Regarding (ii), it is found that aftershocks experience aging, and the associated scaling holds. And regarding (iii), the scaling relation to be satisfied by a class of singular Markovian process…
Extending the central concept of recurrence times for a point process to recurrent events in space-time allows us to characterize seismicity as a record breaking process using only spatiotemporal relations among events. Linking record breaking events with edges between nodes in a graph generates a complex dynamical network isolated from any length, time or magnitude scales set by the observer. For Southern California, the network of recurrences reveals new statistical features of seismicity with robust scaling laws. The rupture length and its scaling with magnitude emerges as a generic measure…
Earthquakes are complex phenomena characterized by some fundamental seismic laws. However, under the framework of brittle fracture in disordered material, these universal scaling behaviors, especially for critical exponents, are still far from understood. In this Letter, we study avalanches in compression of a nonbrittle material, the ductile metallic glass foam. In addition to elasticity and disorder, more complex inelastic effects can be also introduced by strain localization in cellular structures. We show that different from brittle fracture, the additional shear-banding interactions resul…
We propose a simple theory for the ``universal'' scaling law previously reported for the distributions of waiting times between earthquakes. It is based on a largely used benchmark model of seismicity, which just assumes no difference in the physics of foreshocks, mainshocks and aftershocks. Our theoretical calculations provide good fits to the data and show that universality is only approximate. We conclude that the distributions of inter-event times do not reveal more information than what is already known from the Gutenberg-Richter and the Omori power laws. Our results reinforces the view t…
Scaling-law-informed neural point processes for earthquake sequence forecasting
Yunnan Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Brain-Inspired Intelligence（云南省复杂系统与类脑智能重点实验室）；Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学）；Faculty of Science, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学理学院）；Environmental Physics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本古里安大学环境物理系）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本古里安大学）
We revisit the work of Kilston and Knopoff (1983) to study the correlation of earthquakes with the main lunisolar tidal components in the limited zone of the Southern California region, with a considerably bigger amount of data. By adopting the same methodology as these authors, we confirm their results, i.e. that strong earthquakes with M >= 6 show a statistically significant correlation with half day and precession cycles, with respective periods 12 hr. and 18.6 y., while weaker earthquakes show a correlation with the annual cycle. Moreover we extended the study to the analysis of bi-modal p…
In this paper we show, in terms of Fisher information and approximate entropy, that the two strong impulsive kHz electromagnetic (EM) bursts recorder prior to the Athens EQ (7 September 1999, magnitude 5.9) present compatibility to the radar interferometry data and the seismic data analysis, which indicate that two fault segments were activated during Athens EQ. The calculated Fisher information and approximate entropy content ratios closely follow the radar interferometry result that the main fault segment was responsible for 80% of the total energy released, while the secondary fault segment…
We propose a ``multifractal stress activation'' model combining thermally activated rupture and long memory stress relaxation, which predicts that seismic decay rates after mainshocks follow the Omori law $\sim 1/t^p$ with exponents $p$ linearly increasing with the magnitude $M_L$ of the mainshock and the inverse temperature. We carefully test this prediction on earthquake sequences in the Southern California Earthquake catalog: we find power law relaxations of seismic sequences triggered by mainshocks with exponents $p$ increasing with the mainshock magnitude by approximately $0.1-0.15$ for e…
This entry in the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Springer present a summary of some of the concepts and calculational tools that have been developed in attempts to apply statistical physics approaches to seismology. We summarize the leading theoretical physical models of the space-time organization of earthquakes. We present a general discussion and several examples of the new metrics proposed by statistical physicists, underlining their strengths and weaknesses. The entry concludes by briefly outlining future directions. The presentation is organized as follows. I Glossary II…
In the present paper we have conducted studies on seismological properties using worldwide data of deep earthquakes (depth larger than 70 km), considering events with magnitude $m \geq 4.5$. We have addressed the problem under the perspective of complex networks, using a time window model to build the networks for deep earthquakes, which present scale-free and small-world features. This work is an extension of a previous study using a similar approach, for shallow events. Our results for deep events corroborate with those found for the shallow ones, since the connectivity distribution for deep…
We show that the mesoscopic and transport characteristics of networks follow the same trends for the same type of the shear ruptures in terms of rupture speed while also comparing the results of three different friction experiments.The classified fronts obtained from a saw cut Westerly granite fault regarding friction network parameters show a clear separation into two groups indicating two different rupture fronts. With respect to the scaling of local ruptures durations with the networks parameters we show that the gap is related to the possibility of a separation between slow and regular fro…
The Multifractal Stress-Activated (MSA) model is a statistical model of triggered seismicity based on mechanical and thermodynamic principles. It predicts that, above a triggering magnitude cut-off $M_0$, the exponent $p$ of the Omori law for the seismic decay of aftershocks is a linear increasing function $p(M) =a M+b$ of the main shock magnitude $M$. We previously reported empirical support for this prediction, using the Southern California SCEC catalog. Here, we confirm this law using an updated, longer version of the same catalog, as well as new methods to estimate $p$. One of this methods…
In a recent paper [S. Abe and N. Suzuki, Europhys. Lett., 65 (2004) 581], the concept of earthquake network has been introduced in order to describe complexity of seismicity. There, the cell size, which is the scale of coarse graining needed for constructing an earthquake network, has remained as a free parameter. Here, a method is presented for determining it based on the scaling behavior of the network. Quite remarkably, both the exponent of the power-law connectivity distribution and the clustering coefficient are found to approach the respective universal values and remain invariant as the…
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 statistics of recurrence times in broad areas have been reported to obey universal scaling laws, both for single homogeneous regions (Corral, 2003) and when averaged over multiple regions (Bak et al.,2002). These unified scaling laws are characterized by intermediate power law asymptotics. On the other hand, Molchan (2005) has presented a mathematical proof that, if such a universal law exists, it is necessarily an exponential, in obvious contradiction with the data. First, we generalize Molchan's argument to show that an approximate unified law can be found which is compatible with the em…
In their paper (Europhys. Lett., 71 (2005) 1036), Carbone, Sorriso-Valvo, Harabaglia and Guerra showed that "unified scaling law" for conventional waiting times of earthquakes claimed by Bak et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 88 (2002) 178501) is actually not universal. Here, instead of the conventional time, the concept of the internal time termed the event time is considered for seismicity. It is shown that, in contrast to the conventional waiting time, the waiting event time obeys a power law. This implies the existence of temporal long-range correlations in terms of the event time with no sharp dec…
It has been long stated that there are profound analogies between fracture experiments and earthquakes; however, few works attempt a complete characterization of the parallelisms between these so separate phenomena. We study the Acoustic Emission events produced during the compression of Vycor (SiO2). The Gutenberg-Richter law, the modified Omori's law, and the law of aftershock productivity are found to hold for a minimum of 5 decades, are independent of the compression rate, and keep stationary for all the duration of the experiments. The waiting-time distribution fulfills a unified scaling …
Earthquake size-frequency distributions commonly follow a power law, with the b value often used to quantify the relative proportion of small and large events. Laboratory experiments have found that the b value of microfractures decreases with increasing stress. Studies have inferred that this relationship also holds for earthquakes based on observations of earthquake b values varying systematically with faulting style, depth, and for subduction zone earthquakes, plate age. However, these studies are limited by small sample sizes despite aggregating events over large regions, which precludes t…
We base our study on the statistical analysis of the Rigan earthquake 2010 December 20, which consists of estimating the earthquake network by means of virtual seismometer technique, and also considering the avalanche-type dynamics on top of this complex network.The virtual seismometer complex network shows power-law degree distribution with the exponent $γ=2.3\pm 0.2$. Our findings show that the seismic activity is strongly intermittent, and have a \textit{cyclic shape} as is seen in the natural situations, which is main finding of this study. The branching ratio inside and between avalanches…
A recently proposed method of constructing seismic networks from 'record breaking events' from the earthquake catalog of California (Phy. Rev. E, 77 6,066104, 2008) was successfull in establishing causal features to seismicity and arrive at estimates for rupture length and its scaling with magnitude. The results of our implementation of this procedure on the earthquake catalog of Japan establishes the robustness of the procedure. Additionally, we find that the temporal distributions are able to detect heterogeneties in the seismicity of the region.
The unified scaling law for earthquakes, proposed by Bak, Christensen, Danon and Scanlon, is shown to hold worldwide, as well as for areas as diverse as Japan, New Zealand, Spain or New Madrid. The scaling functions that account for the rescaled recurrence-time probability densities show a power-law behavior for long times, with a universal exponent about (minus) 2.2. Another decreasing power law governs short times, but with an exponent that may change from one area to another. This is in contrast with a spatially independent, time-homogenized version of Bak et al's procedure, which seems to …
We invoke a metric to quantify the correlation between any two earthquakes. This provides a simple and straightforward alternative to using space-time windows to detect aftershock sequences and obviates the need to distinguish main shocks from aftershocks. Directed networks of earthquakes are constructed by placing a link, directed from the past to the future, between pairs of events that are strongly correlated. Each link has a weight giving the relative strength of correlation such that the sum over the incoming links to any node equals unity for aftershocks, or zero if the event had no corr…
We discuss various statistical distributions of earthquake numbers. Previously we derived several discrete distributions to describe earthquake numbers for the branching model of earthquake occurrence: these distributions are the Poisson, geometric, logarithmic, and the negative binomial (NBD). The theoretical model is the `birth and immigration' population process. The first three distributions above can be considered special cases of the NBD. In particular, a point branching process along the magnitude (or log seismic moment) axis with independent events (immigrants) explains the magnitude/m…
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…
In this paper, I introduce a novel approach to modelling the individual random component (also called the intra-event uncertainty) of a ground-motion relation (GMR), as well as a novel approach to estimating the corresponding parameters. In essence, I contend that the individual random component is reproduced adequately by a simple stochastic mechanism of random impulses acting in the horizontal plane, with random directions. The random number of impulses was Poisson distributed. The parameters of the model were estimated according to a proposal by Raschke (2013a), with the sample of random di…
We propose that the widely observed and universal Gutenberg-Richter relation is a mathematical consequence of the critical branching nature of earthquake process in a brittle fracture environment. These arguments, though preliminary, are confirmed by recent investigations of the seismic moment distribution in global earthquake catalogs and by the results on the distribution in crystals of dislocation avalanche sizes. We consider possible systematic and random errors in determining earthquake size, especially its seismic moment. These effects increase the estimate of the parameter beta of the p…
