Spatio-Temporal Seismicity in an Elastic Block Lattice Model

An elastic block lattice model is proposed to simulate the spatio-temporal seismicity and stress patterns in the Earth's brittle crust. The famous Gutenberg-Richter magnitude-frequency law in seismology is reproduced. The synthetic catalogs generated by this model are analyzed by using a linked stress release model, which incorporates the stress transfer and spatial interactions. The results highlight the triggering mechanism of earthquake occurrence and the evidence that the crust may lie in a near-critical or self-organized critical state due to the long-range spatial interaction of elastic stress. The spatio-temporal complexity of seismicity is closely related to both nonlinear dynamics of faults and heterogeneities in a seismic region.