Scale-free networks of earthquakes and aftershocks

Marco Baiesi and Maya Paczuski
Phys. Rev. E 69, 066106 – Published 2 June 2004

Abstract

We propose a metric to quantify correlations between earthquakes. The metric consists of a product involving the time interval and spatial distance between two events, as well as the magnitude of the first one. According to this metric, events typically are strongly correlated to only one or a few preceding ones. Thus a classification of events as foreshocks, main shocks, or aftershocks emerges automatically without imposing predetermined space-time windows. In the simplest network construction, each earthquake receives an incoming link from its most correlated predecessor. The number of aftershocks for any event, identified by its outgoing links, is found to be scale free with exponent γ=2.0(1). The original Omori law with p=1 emerges as a robust feature of seismicity, holding up to years even for aftershock sequences initiated by intermediate magnitude events. The broad distribution of distances between earthquakes and their linked aftershocks suggests that aftershock collection with fixed space windows is not appropriate.

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  • Received 15 October 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.066106

©2004 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Marco Baiesi1,2 and Maya Paczuski2,*

  • 1INFM–Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Padova, I-35131 Padova, Italy
  • 2Mathematical Physics, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BZ, United Kingdom

  • *Electronic address: maya@ic.ac.uk

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Vol. 69, Iss. 6 — June 2004

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