On the agreement between small-world-like OFC model and real earthquakes

TL;DR

This study compares small-world and regular topologies in the OFC earthquake model, analyzing earthquake intervals, border effects, and epicenter networks, showing distributions similar to real earthquake data and supporting the Earth's critical state.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of small-world topology effects in the OFC model and links model distributions to real earthquake data, highlighting spatial and temporal correlations.

Findings

Distributions match those observed in real earthquakes.

Small-world topology influences border effects and connectivity.

Results support the Earth's self-organized criticality hypothesis.

Abstract

In this article we implemented simulations of the OFC model for earthquakes for two different topologies: regular and small-world, where in the latter the links are randomly rewired with probability $p$ . In both topologies, we have studied the distribution of time intervals between consecutive earthquakes and the border effects present in each one. In addition, we also have characterized the influence that the probability $p$ produces in certain characteristics of the lattice and in the intensity of border effects. From the two topologies, networks of consecutive epicenters were constructed, that allowed us to analyze the distribution of connectivities of each one. In our results distributions arise belonging to a family of non-traditional distributions functions, which agrees with previous studies using data from actual earthquakes. Our results reinforce the idea that the Earth is in a critical self-organized state and furthermore point towards temporal and spatial correlations between earthquakes in different places.