A Simple Model to Relate the Elastic Ratio Gamma of a Critically Self-Organized Spring-Block Model with the Age of a Lithospheric Downgoing Plate in a Subduction Zone

oleh: Jennifer Perez-Oregon, Alejandro Muñoz-Diosdado, Adolfo Helmut Rudolf-Navarro, Fernando Angulo-Brown

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2020-08-01

Deskripsi

In 1980, Ruff and Kanamori (RK) published an article on seismicity and the subduction zones where they reported that the largest characteristic earthquake (<inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msub><mi>M</mi><mi>w</mi></msub></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>) of a subduction zone is correlated with two geophysical quantities: the rate of convergence between the oceanic and continental plates (<i>V</i>) and the age of the corresponding subducting oceanic lithosphere (<i>T</i>). This proposal was synthetized by using an empirical graph (RK-diagram) that includes the variables <inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msub><mi>M</mi><mi>w</mi></msub></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, <i>V</i> and <i>T</i>. We have recently published an article that reports that there are some common characteristics between real seismicity, sandpaper experiments and a critically self-organized spring-block model. In that paper, among several results we qualitatively recovered a RK-diagram type constructed with equivalent synthetic quantities corresponding to <inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msub><mi>M</mi><mi>w</mi></msub></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, <i>V</i> and <i>T</i>. In the present paper, we improve that synthetic RK-diagram by means of a simple model relating the elastic ratio <i>γ</i> of a critically self-organized spring-block model with the age of a lithospheric downgoing plate. In addition, we extend the RK-diagram by including some large subduction earthquakes occurred after 1980. Similar behavior to the former RK-diagram is observed and its SOC synthetic counterpart is obtained.