Statistics of Earthquakes in Simple Models of Heterogeneous Faults

TL;DR

This paper investigates simple models of earthquake faults with heterogeneity, revealing how disorder and dynamics influence earthquake size distributions and critical behavior through analytical and simulation methods.

Contribution

It introduces models operating at a critical point, demonstrating how dynamical effects alter earthquake statistics from power laws to mixed distributions.

Findings

Models exhibit power law earthquake statistics at criticality

Dynamical effects can produce characteristic event sizes

Analytic and simulation methods complement each other

Abstract

Simple models for ruptures along a heterogeneous earthquake fault zone are studied, focussing on the interplay between the roles of disorder and dynamical effects. A class of models are found to operate naturally at a critical point whose properties yield power law scaling of earthquake statistics. Various dynamical effects can change the behavior to a distribution of small events combined with characteristic system size events. The studies employ various analytic methods as well as simulations.