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

Abstract

In 1980, Ruff and Kanamori (RK) published an article on seismicity and the subduction zones where they reported that the largest characteristic earthquake (Mw) of a subduction zone is correlated with two geophysical quantities: the rate of convergence between the oceanic and continental plates (V) and the age of the corresponding subducting oceanic lithosphere (T). This proposal was synthetized by using an empirical graph (RK-diagram) that includes the variables Mw, V and T. 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 Mw, V and T. In the present paper, we improve that synthetic RK-diagram by means of a simple model relating the elastic ratio γ 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.

Keywords

• self-organized criticality
• Ruff–Kanamori diagram
• spring-block model