Analysis of Self-Organized Criticality in the Olami-Feder-Christensen model and in real earthquakes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the self-organized criticality in the Olami-Feder-Christensen model and real earthquakes, revealing fat-tailed distributions of avalanche sizes and energy differences, supporting the idea of long-range interactions in seismic activity.

Contribution

It demonstrates that avalanche size differences follow q-Gaussian distributions regardless of time intervals, linking model behavior to real earthquake data and emphasizing the role of long-range interactions.

Findings

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

Energy differences in real earthquakes also follow similar distributions.

Predicting earthquake magnitude from previous events is not feasible.

Abstract

We perform a new analysis on the dissipative Olami-Feder-Christensen model on a small world topology considering avalanche size differences. We show that when criticality appears the Probability Density Functions (PDFs) for the avalanche size differences at different times have fat tails with a q-Gaussian shape. This behaviour does not depend on the time interval adopted and is found also when considering energy differences between real earthquakes. Such a result can be analytically understood if the sizes (released energies) of the avalanches (earthquakes) have no correlations. Our findings support the hypothesis that a self-organized criticality mechanism with long-range interactions is at the origin of seismic events and indicate that it is not possible to predict the magnitude of the next earthquake knowing those of the previous ones.