Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 214
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-70702-y

Regular Article

Scale-invariant structure of energy fluctuations in real earthquakes

Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, 100049 Beijing, P.R. China

^a e-mail: pwang@ihep.ac.cn

Received: 24 November 2016
Received in final form: 27 June 2017
Published online: 13 November 2017

Abstract

Earthquakes are obviously complex phenomena associated with complicated spatiotemporal correlations, and they are generally characterized by two power laws: the Gutenberg-Richter (GR) and the Omori-Utsu laws. However, an important challenge has been to explain two apparently contrasting features: the GR and Omori-Utsu laws are scale-invariant and unaffected by energy or time scales, whereas earthquakes occasionally exhibit a characteristic energy or time scale, such as with asperity events. In this paper, three high-quality datasets on earthquakes were used to calculate the earthquake energy fluctuations at various spatiotemporal scales, and the results reveal the correlations between seismic events regardless of their critical or characteristic features. The probability density functions (PDFs) of the fluctuations exhibit evidence of another scaling that behaves as a q-Gaussian rather than random process. The scaling behaviors are observed for scales spanning three orders of magnitude. Considering the spatial heterogeneities in a real earthquake fault, we propose an inhomogeneous Olami-Feder-Christensen (OFC) model to describe the statistical properties of real earthquakes. The numerical simulations show that the inhomogeneous OFC model shares the same statistical properties with real earthquakes.