Scaling of Earthquake Models with Inhomogeneous Stress Dissipation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spatial inhomogeneities in stress dissipation affect the scaling behavior of earthquake fault models, revealing that damage distribution influences scaling properties.

Contribution

It introduces a study of scaling in modified earthquake models considering inhomogeneous stress dissipation and damage distribution effects.

Findings

Scaling depends on damage amount and spatial distribution

Inhomogeneities influence stress transfer and fault system behavior

Long-range stress transfer interacts with inhomogeneities to affect scaling

Abstract

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 with the inhomogeneities of the system. We find that the scaling depends not only on the amount of damage, but also on the spatial distribution of that damage.