English

Seismic quiescence and b-value decrease before large events in forest-fire model

Geophysics 2015-12-17 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Forest fire models may be interpreted as a simple model for earthquake occurrence by translating trees and fire into stressed segments of a fault and their rupture, respectively. Here we adopt a twodimensional forest-fire model in continuous time, and focus on the temporal changes of seismicity and the b-value. We find the b-value change and seismic quiescence prior to large earthquakes by stacking many sequences towards large earthquakes. As the magnitude-frequency relation in this model is directly related to the cluster-size distribution, decrease of the b-value can be explained in terms of the change in the cluster-size distribution. Decrease of the b-value means that small clusters of stressed sites aggregate into a larger cluster. Seismic quiescence may be attributed to the decrease of stressed sites that do not belong to percolated clusters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.05188,
  title  = {Seismic quiescence and b-value decrease before large events in forest-fire model},
  author = {Tetsuya Mitsudo and Takahiro Hatano and Naoyuki Kato},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.05188},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:11:15.226Z