Self-organized critical earthquake model with moving boundary

Abstract

A globally driven self-organized critical model of earthquakes with conservative dynamics has been studied. An open but moving boundary condition has been used so that the origin (epicenter) of every avalanche (earthquake) is at the center of the boundary. As a result, all avalanches grow in equivalent conditions and the avalanche size distribution obeys finite size scaling excellent. Though the recurrence time distribution of the time series of avalanche sizes obeys well both the scaling forms recently observed in analysis of the real data of earthquakes, it is found that the scaling function decays only exponentially in contrast to a generalized gamma distribution observed in the real data analysis. The non-conservative version of the model shows periodicity even with open boundary.