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 power-law distribution of earthquake sizes. In particular, we find that estimated beta-values may be inflated by 1-3% because relative moment uncertainties decrease with increasing earthquake size. Moreover, earthquake clustering greatly influences the beta-parameter. If clusters (aftershock sequences) are taken as the entity to be studied, then the exponent value for their size distribution would decrease by 5-10%. The complexity of any earthquake source also inflates the estimated beta-value by at least 3-7%. The centroid depth distribution also should influence the beta-value, an approximate calculation suggests that the exponent value may be increased by 2-6%. Taking all these effects into account, we propose that the recently obtained beta-value of 0.63 could be reduced to about 0.52--0.56: near the universal constant value (1/2) predicted by theoretical arguments. We also consider possible consequences of the universal beta-value and its relevance for theoretical and practical understanding of earthquake occurrence in various tectonic and Earth structure environments. Using comparative crystal deformation results may help us understand the generation of seismic tremors and slow earthquakes and illuminate the transition from brittle fracture to plastic flow.
The complete part of the earthquake frequency-magnitude distribution (FMD), above completeness magnitude mc, is well described by the Gutenberg-Richter law. The parameter mc however varies in space due to the seismic network configuration, yielding a convoluted FMD shape below max(mc). This paper investigates the shape of the generalized FMD (GFMD), which may be described as a mixture of elemental FMDs (eFMDs) defined as asymmetric Laplace distributions of mode mc [Mignan, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JB009347]. An asymmetric Laplace mixture model (GFMD- ALMM) is thus proposed with its pa…
The Groningen gas field shows exponential growth in earthquakes event counts around a magnitude M1 with a doubling time of 6-9 years since 2001. This behavior is identified with dimensionless curvature in land subsidence, which has been evolving at a constant rate over the last few decades {essentially uncorrelated to gas production.} We demonstrate our mechanism by a tabletop crack formation experiment. The observed skewed distribution of event magnitudes is matched by that of maxima of event clusters with a normal distribution. It predicts about one event $<$\,M5 per day in 2025, pointing to…
The distribution of seismic moment is of capital interest to evaluate earthquake hazard, in particular regarding the most extreme events. We make use of likelihood-ratio tests to compare the simple Gutenberg-Richter power-law distribution with two statistical models that incorporate an exponential tail: the so-called tapered Gutenberg-Richter and the truncated gamma, when fitted to the global CMT earthquake catalog. The outcome is that the truncated gamma model outperforms the other two models. If simulated samples of the truncated gamma are reshuffled in order to mimic the time occurrence of …
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 driving concept behind one of the most successful statistical forecasting models, the ETAS model, has been that the seismicity is driven by spontaneously occurring background earthquakes that cascade into multitudes of triggered earthquakes. In nearly all generalizations of the ETAS model, the magnitudes of the background and the triggered earthquakes are assumed to follow Gutenberg-Richter law with the same exponent (\b{eta}-value). Furthermore, the magnitudes of the triggered earthquakes are always assumed to be independent of the magnitude of the triggering earthquake. Using an EM algor…
By analyzing the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) seismic catalog for different tectonic settings, we have found that the probability distributions of time intervals between successive earthquakes --interoccurrence times-- can be described by the superposition of the Weibull distribution and the log-Weibull distribution. In particular, the distribution of large earthquakes obeys the Weibull distribution with the exponent $α_1 <1$, indicating the fact that the sequence of large earthquakes is not a Poisson process. It is found that the ratio of the Weibull distribution to the probability distr…
The distribution of inter-occurrence time between seismic events is a quantity of great interest in seismic risk assessment. We evaluate this distribution for different models of earthquakes occurrence and follow two distinct approaches: The non homogeneous Poissonian and the non Poissonian one. In all cases we obtain either a power law or a power law damped by an exponential factor behaviour. This feature of the distribution makes impossible any prediction of earthquakes occurrence. Nevertheless it suggests the interpretation of the earthquake occurrence phenomenon as due to some non-linear d…
As an object of study, we chose the global activity of strong earthquakes (M > 7). The subject of the study is the waiting time for the next strong earthquake. The purpose of the study is to compare two distributions of waiting time, one of which is calculated when ordering events according to world time, and the second when ordering according to proper time. We have come up with unique underground clock to counting proper time. The average waiting time is 25 days in world time, and 10 ticks in proper time. We assert with a high degree of confidence that both distributions obey an exponential …
In this paper, we propose a stochastic dynamic model for earthquake rupture and suggest that the Langevin equation of frictions may be used for interpreting the slip distributions of rupture processes in earthquakes. The steady-state solution of the derived Langevin equation analytically attains the truncated exponential (TEX) distribution that is empirically characterized in many rupture models of earthquake events worldwide, as demonstrated by Thingbaijam and Mai (2016, https://doi.org/10.1785/0120150291). Our proposed stochastic dynamic faulting model for earthquake rupture intrinsically in…
In this short note, I comment on the research of Pisarenko et al. (2014) regarding the extreme value theory and statistics in case of earthquake magnitudes. The link between the generalized extreme value distribution (GEVD) as an asymptotic model for the block maxima of a random variable and the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) as a model for the peak over thresholds (POT) of the same random variable is presented more clearly. Pisarenko et al. (2014) have inappropriately neglected that the approximations by GEVD and GPD work only asymptotically in most cases. This applies particularly for…
The recent evolution of induced seismicity in Central United States calls for exhaustive catalogs to improve seismic hazard assessment. Over the last decades, the volume of seismic data has increased exponentially, creating a need for efficient algorithms to reliably detect and locate earthquakes. Today's most elaborate methods scan through the plethora of continuous seismic records, searching for repeating seismic signals. In this work, we leverage the recent advances in artificial intelligence and present ConvNetQuake, a highly scalable convolutional neural network for earthquake detection a…
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.
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 view…
We report an empirical determination of the probability density functions P(r) of the number r of earthquakes in finite space-time windows for the California catalog, over fixed spatial boxes 5 x 5 km^2 and time intervals dt =1, 10, 100 and 1000 days. We find a stable power law tail P(r) ~ 1/r^{1+mu} with exponent mu \approx 1.6 for all time intervals. These observations are explained by a simple stochastic branching process previously studied by many authors, the ETAS (epidemic-type aftershock sequence) model which assumes that each earthquake can trigger other earthquakes (``aftershocks''). …
The data analysis of aftershock events of L Aquila earthquake in Apennines following the main 6.3 Mw event of April 6, 2009 has been carried out by standard statistical geophysical tools. The results show the heterogeneity of seismic activity in five different geographical sub-regions indicated by anomalous critical indices of power law distributions: the exponents of the Omori law, the b values of Gutenberg-Richter magnitude-frequency distribution, and the distribution of waiting times. The heterogeneous distribution of dynamic stress and a different morphology in the five sub-regions has bee…
In the present paper, we analyze the fractal structures in magnitude time series for a set of unprecedented sample extracted from the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) catalog corresponding to 12 Circum-Pacific subduction zones from Chile to Kermadec. For this end, we used the classical Rescaled Range ($R/S$) analysis for estimating the long-term persistence signature derived from scaling parameter so-called Hurst exponent, $H$. As a result, we measured the referred exponent and obtained all values of $H>0.5$, indicating that a long-term memory effect exists. The main contribution …
Earthquake Dynamics as a Benchmark for Scale-Invariant Behavior
Université Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；CNRS, Institut Lumière Matière, UMR5306（法国国家科学研究中心，光与物质研究所）；Instituto de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso (PUCV)（天主教辅仁瓦尔帕莱索大学物理研究所）
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…
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 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 …
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 consider two statistical regularities that were used to explain Omori's law of the aftershock rate decay: the Levy and Inverse Gaussian (IGD) distributions. These distributions are thought to describe stress behavior influenced by various random factors: post-earthquake stress time history is described by a Brownian motion. Both distributions decay to zero for time intervals close to zero. But this feature contradicts the high immediate aftershock level according to Omori's law. We propose that these statistical distributions are influenced by the power-law stress distribution near the eart…
Volcanic seismicity at Mt. Etna is studied. It is found that the associated stochastic process exhibits a subdiffusive phenomenon. The jump probability distribution well obeys an exponential law, whereas the waiting-time distribution follows a power law in a wide range. Although these results would seem to suggest that the phenomenon could be described by temporally-fractional kinetic theory based on the viewpoint of continuous-time random walks, the exponent of the power-law waiting-time distribution actually lies outside of the range allowed in the theory. In addition, there exists the aging…
The area-characteristic, maximum possible earthquake magnitude $T_M$ is required by the earthquake engineering community, disaster management agencies and the insurance industry. The Gutenberg-Richter law predicts that earthquake magnitudes $M$ follow a truncated exponential distribution. In the geophysical literature several estimation procedures were proposed, see for instance Kijko and Singh (Acta Geophys., 2011) and the references therein. Estimation of $T_M$ is of course an extreme value problem to which the classical methods for endpoint estimation could be applied. We argue that recent …
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…
The district of southern California and Japan are divided into small cubic cells, each of which is regarded as a vertex of a graph if earthquakes occur therein. Two successive earthquakes define an edge and a loop, which replace the complex fault-fault interaction. In this way, the seismic data are mapped to a random graph. It is discovered that an evolving random graph associated with earthquakes behaves as a scale-free network of the Barabasi-Albert type. The distributions of connectivities in the graphs thus constructed are found to decay as a power law, showing a novel feature of earthquak…
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 quantify the correlation between earthquakes and use the same to distinguish between relevant causally connected earthquakes. Our correlation metric is a variation on the one introduced by Baiesi and Paczuski (2004). A network of earthquakes is constructed, which is time ordered and with links between the more correlated ones. Recurrences to earthquakes are identified employing correlation thresholds to demarcate the most meaningful ones in each cluster. Data pertaining to three different seismic regions, viz. California, Japan and Himalayas, are comparatively analyzed using such a network …
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…
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 report an empirical determination of the probability density functions $P_{\text{data}}(r)$ of the number $r$ of earthquakes in finite space-time windows for the California catalog. We find a stable power law tail $P_{\text{data}}(r) \sim 1/r^{1+μ}$ with exponent $μ\approx 1.6$ for all space ($5 \times 5$ to $20 \times 20$ km$^2$) and time intervals (0.1 to 1000 days). These observations, as well as the non-universal dependence on space-time windows for all different space-time windows simultaneously, are explained by solving one of the most used reference model in seismology (ETAS), which …
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 …
We report on an extensive characterization of the cracking noise produced by charcoal samples when dampened with ethanol. We argue that the evaporation of ethanol causes transient and irregularly distributed internal stresses that promote the fragmentation of the samples and mimic some situations found in mining processes. The results show that, in general, the most fundamental seismic laws ruling earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law, unified scaling law for the recurrence times, Omori's law, productivity law and Bath's law) hold under the conditions of the experiment. Some discrepancies were al…
We consider a branching model of triggered seismicity, the ETAS (epidemic-type aftershock sequence) model which assumes that each earthquake can trigger other earthquakes (``aftershocks''). An aftershock sequence results in this model from the cascade of aftershocks of each past earthquake. Due to the large fluctuations of the number of aftershocks triggered directly by any earthquake (``productivity'' or ``fertility''), there is a large variability of the total number of aftershocks from one sequence to another, for the same mainshock magnitude. We study the regime where the distribution of f…
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…
Statistical properties of the one-dimensional spring-block (Burridge-Knopoff) model of earthquakes obeying the rate and state dependent friction law are studied by extensive computer simulations. The quantities computed include the magnitude distribution, the rupture-length distribution, the mainshock recurrence-time distribution, the seismic time correlations before and after the mainshock, the mean slip amount, and the mean stress drop at the mainshock, etc. Events of the model can be classified into two distinct categories. One tends to be unilateral with its epicenter located at the rim of…
The upper bound earthquake magnitude (maximum possible magnitude) of a truncated Gutenberg-Richter relation is the right truncation point (right end-point) of a truncated exponential distribution and is important in the probabilistic seismic hazard analysis. It is frequently estimated by the Bayesian inference. This is a non-regular case and suffers some shortcomings in contrast to the Bayesian inference for the regular case of likelihood function. Here previous non-Bayesian inference methods are outlined and discussed as alternatives including, the formulation of the corresponding confidence …
A comparative study is performed on volcanic seismicities at Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, and Mt. Etna in Sicily from the viewpoint of complex systems science, and the discovery of remarkable similarities between them is reported. In these seismicities as point processes, the jump probability distributions of earthquakes (i.e., distributions of the distance between the hypocenters of two successive events) are found to obey the exponential law, whereas the waiting-time distributions (i.e., distributions of inter-occurrence time of two successive events) follow the power law. A careful …
The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) aims to prospectively test time-dependent earthquake probability forecasts on their consistency with observations. To compete, time-dependent seismicity models are calibrated on earthquake catalog data. But catalogs contain much observational uncertainty. We study the impact of magnitude uncertainties on rate estimates in clustering models, on their forecasts and on their evaluation by CSEP's consistency tests. First, we quantify magnitude uncertainties. We find that magnitude uncertainty is more heavy-tailed than a Gaussian, …
The generalized logistic equation is derived to model kinetics and statistics of natural processes such as earthquakes, forest fires, floods, landslides, and many others. The general solution of this equation for q=1 is a product of an increasing bounded function and power-law function with stretched exponential cut-off; the power-law distribution is asymptotically nested in the stretched exponential distribution. The relation with Tsallis non-extensive statistics is demonstrated by solving the generalized logistic equation for q>0. In the case 0<q<1 the equation models super-additive, and 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…
Design and Implementation of a 25-Yr Pseudoprospective Earthquake Forecasting Experiment in China (AoyuX)
School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学系统科学学院）；International Academic Center of Complex Systems, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学复杂系统国际学术中心）；Department of Systems Science, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学文理学院系统科学系）
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…
Inspired by extremely simplified view of the earthquakes we propose the stochastic domino cellular automaton model exhibiting avalanches. From elementary combinatorial arguments we derive a set of nonlinear equations describing the automaton. Exact relations between the average parameters of the model are presented. Depending on imposed triggering, the model reproduces both exponential and inverse power statistics of clusters.
The understanding of long-distance relations between seismic activities has for long been of interest to seismologists and geologists. In this paper we have used data from the world-wide earthquake catalog for the period between 1972 and 2011 to generate a network of sites around the world for earthquakes with magnitude m $\geq$ 4.5 in the Richter scale. After the network construction, we have analyzed the results under two viewpoints. Firstly, in contrast to previous works, which have considered just small areas, we showed that the best fitting for networks of seismic events is not a pure pow…
In the present paper, we analyze the signatures of long-range persistence in seismic sequences along Circum-Pacific subduction zones, from Chile to Kermadec, extracted from the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) catalog. This region, known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, is the world's most active fault line, containing about 90$\%$ of the world's earthquakes. We used the classical rescaled range ($R/S$) analysis to estimate the long-term persistence signals derived from a scaling parameter called the Hurst exponent, $H$. We measured the referred exponent and obtained values of $H>0.5$…
The decay rate of aftershocks has been modeled as a power law since the pioneering work of Omori in the late nineteenth century. Considered the second most fundamental empirical law after the Gutenberg-Richter relationship, the power law paradigm has rarely been challenged by the seismological community. By taking a view of aftershock research not biased by prior conceptions of Omori power law decay and by applying statistical methods recommended in applied mathematics, I show that all aftershock sequences tested in three regional earthquake catalogs (Southern and Northern California, Taiwan) …
