Further seismic properties of a spring-block earthquake model

Abstract

Within the context of self-organized critical systems, Olami et al. (OFC) (1992) proposed a spring-block earthquake model. This model is non-conservative and reproduces some seismic properties such as the Gutenberg-Richter law for the size distribution of earthquakes. In this paper we study further seismic properties of the OFC model and we find the stair-shaped curves of the cumulative seismicity. We also find that in the long term these curves have a characteristic straight-line envelope of constant slope that works as an attractor of the cumulative seismicity, and that these slopes depend on the system size and cannot be arbitrarily large. Finally, we report that in the OFC model the recurrence time distribution for large events follows a log-normal behaviour for some non-conservation levels.