Motifs in earthquake networks: Romania, Italy, United States of America, and Japan

TL;DR

This study analyzes earthquake networks in Romania, Italy, Japan, and California, revealing scale-free connectivity and motifs that support seismicity as a critical phenomenon, using robust statistical methods and open-source tools.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive network analysis of seismic zones, demonstrating consistent power-law distributions and providing a new open-source toolbox for earthquake data analysis.

Findings

Seismic networks exhibit scale-free connectivity and motifs.

Power-law distributions are robust across different discretizations.

The new toolbox facilitates automatic analysis of earthquake databases.

Abstract

We present a detailed description of seismic activity in Romania, Italy, and Japan, as well as the California seismic zone in the United States of America, based on the statistical analysis of the underlying earthquake networks used to model the aforementioned zones. Our results on network connectivity and simple network motifs allow for a complex description of seismic zones, while at the same time reinforcing the current understanding of seismicity as a critical phenomenon. The reported distributions on node connectivity, three-, and four-event motifs are consistent with power-law, i.e., scale-free, distributions over large intervals and are robust across earthquake networks obtained from different discretizations of the seismic zones of interest. In our analysis of the distributions of node connectivity and simple motifs, we distinguish between the global distribution and the powerlaw part of it with the help of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method and complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDF). The main message is that the distributions reported for the aforementioned seismic zones have large power-law components, extending over some orders of magnitude, independent of discretization. All the results were obtained using publicly-available databases and open-source software, as well as a new toolbox available on GitHub, specifically designed to automatically analyze earthquake databases.