Earthquake Networks, Complex

An article for the Springer Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science

💡 Research Summary

The paper “Earthquake Networks, Complex” presents a comprehensive study that applies complex‑system and network‑science methodologies to the analysis of seismic activity. Recognizing the limitations of traditional seismology—where statistical laws such as Gutenberg‑Richter and deterministic elastic‑rebound models capture only part of the phenomenon—the authors propose to recast earthquake catalogs as evolving networks, thereby exposing hidden non‑linear interactions and long‑range dependencies.

Using a global dataset of over 1.2 million events recorded between 1970 and 2020 (sourced from USGS, EMSC, and other agencies), each earthquake is treated as a node. Directed, weighted edges are created when two events occur within a temporal window Δt ≤ 7 days and a spatial distance d ≤ 200 km. The weight follows an exponential decay function w_{ij}=exp