A Description of Seismicity Based on Non-extensive Statistical Physics: A Review

Earthquakes have always been one the most intriguing natural phenomena for mankind. The abruptness of the shaking ground and the devastating consequences for the human environment were always attracting people’s fear and wonder. Despite the large amount of effort that has been dedicated in understanding the physical processes that lead to the birth of an earthquake and the significant progress that has been achieved in this field, the prediction of an upcoming earthquake still remains a challenging question (Nature debates 1999). Concerning the physics of earthquakes, many questions have not yet been answered since the phenomenon is subjected to many uncertainties and degrees of freedom. It is true that we have a good understanding of the propagation of seismic waves through the Earth and that given a large set of seismographic records, we are able to reconstruct a posteriori the history of the fault rupture. However, when we consider the physical processes leading to the initiation of a rupture with a subsequent slip and its growth through a fault system, giving rise to an earthquake, then our knowledge is really limited. Not only the friction law and the rules that govern rupture evolution are largely unknown, but also the role of many other processes such as plasticity, fluid migration, chemical reactions, etc., and the couplings among them, remain unclear (Main et al. 1989, 1992; Sammonds 2005; Sammonds and Ohnaka 1998; Vallianatos et al. 2004).