| AbstractTraditional fractal
analysis methods of earthquake temporal clustering treat earthquake
events as mathematical points (without mass) in time (Smalley et
al., 1987). The results obtained by these methods mainly reflect the
seismic behavior of numerous small earthquakes. A sieve method of
physical fractal analysis has been developed in the present article in
which a series of magnitude sieves are used to study the fractal
behavior of earthquakes with different magnitudes. Fractal analyses of
earthquake clustering are conducted for three regions: northern China,
mainland of China, and southern California. We find that all the
earthquake subsets of each region show nearly the same fractal
dimension, D = 0.3 for northern China and the mainland of China
and D = 0.4 for southern California. The scaling ranges in which
the corresponding earthquake subsets under consideration exhibit fractal
features vary from subset to subset. The method has the potential
application to characterizing the fractal behavior of earthquake
clustering for different regions.Return to Table of
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