Persistence and Quiescence of Seismicity on Fault Systems
Preprint
- 23 April 1999
Abstract
We study the statistics of simulated earthquakes in a quasistatic model of two parallel heterogeneous faults within a slowly driven elastic tectonic plate. The probability that one fault remains dormant while the other is active for a time Dt following the previous activity shift is proportional to the inverse of Dt to the power 1+x, a result that is robust in the presence of annealed noise and strength weakening. A mean field theory accounts for the observed dependence of the persistence exponent x as a function of heterogeneity and distance between faults. These results continue to hold if the number of competing faults is increased. This is related to the persistence phenomenon discovered in a large variety of systems, which specifies how long a relaxing dynamical system remains in a neighborhood of its initial configuration. Our persistence exponent is found to vary as a function of heterogeneity and distance between faults, thus defining a novel universality class.Keywords
All Related Versions
- Version 1, 1999-04-23, ArXiv
- Published version: Physical Review Letters, 83 (20), 4219.
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: