Modelling earthquake activity features using cellular automata

Cellular automata (CA) are a powerful technique for modelling otherwise intractably complex systems. On the other hand, earthquake can be defined as a spatially extended dissipative dynamic system that naturally evolves into a critical state with no characteristic time or length scales. In this paper, a two-dimensional CA model capable of reproducing some prominent features of earthquake data is presented. The proposed model with continuous states and discrete time, comprises cell-charges and aims at simulating earthquake activity with the usage of potentials. Several measurements have been carried out at different critical states, leading to different paths to criticality, for various cascade (earthquake) sizes, various cell activities and different neighbourhood sizes. Most notably, the produced simulation results emulate the Gutenberg–Richter (GR) scaling law, in both quantitative and qualitative way. Furthermore, the CA model has been implemented with a user-friendly interface and the user can change several of its parameters, in order to study various hypotheses concerning the aforementioned earthquake activity features.