Evidence of Long-range Correlations in Shallow Earthquakes (Vol. 49 No.4)

Earthquakes are one of the most devastating natural disasters by the number of casualties and the negative economic impact. Seismic phenomena have been studied from the viewpoint of complex systems, where complex patterns arise from nonlinear interactions between their elements. One of such ways is using networks of geographical sites; we introduce a new methodology to construct networks of epicenters and applied it to global catalogs of shallow earthquakes. It involves essentially the introduction of a time window, which works as a temporal filter for vertices connections. The resulting network constructed has small-world properties and presents scale-free properties in its connectivity distribution, which we proved to be invariant with respect to the value of the time window adopted. Vertices with larger connectivity in the network correspond to areas with very intense seismic activity in the period considered. These new results constitute evidences of possible spatial and temporal long-range correlations between earthquakes.

D. Ferreira, J. Ribeiro, A. Papa and R. Menezes, Towards evidence of long-range correlations in shallow seismic activities, EPL 121, 58003 (2018)
[Abstract]