Is Seismicity Operating at a Critical Point?

Seismicity and faulting within the Earth's crust are characterized by many scaling laws that are usually interpreted as qualifying the existence of underlying physical mechanisms associated with some kind of criticality in the sense of phase transitions. Using an augmented epidemic-type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model that accounts for the spatial variability of the background rates μ(x,y), we present a direct quantitative test of criticality. We calibrate the model to the ANSS catalog of the entire globe, the region around California, and the Geonet catalog for the region around New Zealand using an extended expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm including the determination of μ(x,y).

Condensation of earthquake location distributions: Optimal spatial information encoding and application to multifractal analysis of south Californian seismicity.

We present the "condensation" method that exploits the heterogeneity of the probability distribution functions (PDFs) of event locations to improve the spatial information content of seismic catalogs. As its name indicates, the condensation method reduces the size of seismic catalogs while improving the access to the spatial information content of seismic catalogs. The PDFs of events are first ranked by decreasing location errors and then successively condensed onto better located and lower variance event PDFs.