Self-Organized Criticality and earthquakes

TL;DR

This paper explores the statistical properties of earthquake models exhibiting Self-Organized Criticality, revealing fat-tailed distributions in avalanche sizes and energy differences, consistent with real earthquake data.

Contribution

It demonstrates that avalanche size differences follow q-Gaussian distributions in SOC models and real earthquakes, independent of time intervals.

Findings

Avalanche size differences have fat-tailed q-Gaussian PDFs.

Energy differences in real earthquakes also follow q-Gaussian distributions.

Distribution shape is invariant across different time intervals.

Abstract

We discuss recent results on a new analysis regarding models showing Self-Organized Criticality (SOC), and in particular on the OFC one. We show that Probability Density Functions (PDFs) for the avalanche size differences at different times have fat tails with a q-Gaussian shape. This behavior does not depend on the time interval adopted and it is also found when considering energy differences between real earthquakes.