Spatiotemporal analysis of earthquake occurrence in synthetic and worldwide data

The present work presents spatiotemporal analyses of distributions between successive earthquakes. This study comprehends data produced by a modified version of the Olami–Feder–Christensen model with a small-world topology and actual worldwide earthquakes from 2000 to 2019. The distributions were studied from the nonextensive statistical mechanic’s viewpoint, which was shown to be a suitable approach since q-exponential functions produced better fittings to data than pure power laws. Our results show that, by applying scaling relationships, the probability distributions have data collapses in all cases. It reinforces the conception of a critical behavior in the seismological phenomenon and that there is no differentiation between the spatiotemporal statistical features of earthquakes, whether small or large in size or magnitude. In addition, the presence of q-exponential distributions and the ability of a small-world-like OFC model to reproduce spatiotemporal features of real worldwide earthquakes indicate self-organized criticality and long-range spatiotemporal correlations between earthquakes.