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A new fractal approach to the clustering of earthquakes: Physical fractal

State Seismological Bureau, Beijing, P.R. China
Institute of Geophysics State Seismological Bureau, Beijing, P.R. China
Institute of Tectonics University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064

Abstract

Traditional fractal analysis methods of earthquake temporal clustering treat earthquake events as mathematical points (without mass) in time (Smalley et al., 1987). The results obtained by these methods mainly reflect the seismic behavior of numerous small earthquakes. A sieve method of physical fractal analysis has been developed in the present article in which a series of magnitude sieves are used to study the fractal behavior of earthquakes with different magnitudes. Fractal analyses of earthquake clustering are conducted for three regions: northern China, mainland of China, and southern California. We find that all the earthquake subsets of each region show nearly the same fractal dimension, D = 0.3 for northern China and the mainland of China and D = 0.4 for southern California. The scaling ranges in which the corresponding earthquake subsets under consideration exhibit fractal features vary from subset to subset. The method has the potential application to characterizing the fractal behavior of earthquake clustering for different regions.