Renormalization of earthquake aftershocks

Together with the Gutenberg-Richter distribution of earthquake magnitudes, Omori's law is the best established empirical characterization of earthquake sequences and states that the number of smaller earthquakes per unit time triggered by a main shock decays approximately as the inverse of the time ($1/t^p$, with $p \approx 1$) since the main shock. Based on these observations, we explore the theoretical hypothesis in which each earthquake can produce a series of aftershock independently of its size according to its ``local'' Omori's law with exponent $p=1+\theta$. In this scenario, an aftershock of the main shock produces itself other aftershocks which themselves produce aftershocks, and so on. The global observable Omori's law is found to have two distinct power law regimes, the first one with exponent $p_-=1 - \theta$ for time $t < t^* \sim \kappa^{-1/\theta}$, where $0<1-\kappa 1$.