HR: 14:25h
AN: NG32A-04    [PDF]
TI: Spinodal Critical Points, Scaling and Predictibility
AU: * Klein, W
EM: klein@bu.edu
AF: Boston University Physics Department, 590 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215 United States
AB: The critical point hypothesis, that there exists a critical point in earthquake fault systems, is attractive in that it provides a physical basis for the observed scaling laws seen in the data. However, the existence of a critical point is not enough to explain other observed properties of fault systems such as the earthquake cycle, including the possible existence of runup to failure. In addition, the critical point itself provides no physical basis for prediction or forcasting. Over the past several years we have proposed an alternative paradigm which we call the Self Organized Spinodal(SOS) Hypothesis. This is based on the fact that faults and fault systems have stress Greens functions that have a very long range. Such systems are known to be well approximated by meanfield. These systems have a spinodal critical point that marks the boundary betwee metastable and unstable states. Such spinodal points act in many ways like critical points, i.e. they generate scaling, however they also give rise to other phenomena such as nucleation which play a role in the earthquake cycle. The SOS picture then naturally generates an earthquake cycle and provides a physical basis for the forcasting algorithm developed by our group. In this presentation I will explain the SOS hypothesis and describe how it generates scaling as well as how it can be used as a basis for statistical forcasting.
DE: 7260 Theory and modeling
SC: Nonlinear Geophysics [NG]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting