Spatial and Temporal Clustering in a Simple Earthquake Asperity Model
Abstract
Natural earthquake fault systems are highly heterogeneous in space, the result of inhomogeneities that are a function of the variety of materials of different strengths. However, despite their inhomogeneous nature, real faults are often modeled as spatially homogeneous systems. Here we present a simple earthquake fault model based on the Olami-Feder-Christensen (OFC) and Rundle-Jackson-Brown (RJB) cellular automata models with long-range interactions that incorporates asperities, or stronger sites, into the lattice (Rundle and Jackson, 1977; Olami et al., 1992). These asperity cells are significantly stronger than the surrounding lattice sites but eventually rupture when the applied stress reaches their higher threshold stress. The introduction of these spatial heterogeneities results in spatial and temporal clustering in the model similar to that seen in natural fault systems. We observe sequences of activity that begin with a gradually accelerating number of larger events, or foreshocks, prior to a large event, followed by a tail of decreasing activity, or aftershocks. These recurrent large events occur at regular intervals and the characteristic time between events and their magnitude are a function of the stress dissipation parameter. The relative length of the foreshock to aftershock sequence depends on the amount of stress dissipation in the system. This work provides further evidence that the spatial and temporal patterns observed in natural seismicity are strongly influenced by the underlying physical properties and are not solely the result of a simple cascade mechanism. We find that the scaling depends not only on the amount of damage, but also on the spatial distribution of that damage (Dominguez et al., 2011; Kazemian et al., 2014). Here we compare the modeled sequences to those of natural earthquake sequences from California and around the world in order to investigate the interplay between cascade dynamics and spatial structure.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMNG21A1811T
- Keywords:
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- 4415 Cascades;
- NONLINEAR GEOPHYSICSDE: 4475 Scaling: spatial and temporal;
- NONLINEAR GEOPHYSICS