Modelling Critical and Catastrophic Phenomena in Geoscience / Моделирование критических и катастрофических явлений в геологии

Geophysics, or physics modelling of geological phenomena, is as old and as established as geoscience itself. The statistical physics modelling of various geophysical phenomena, earthquake in particular, is comparatively recent. This book intends to cover these recent developments in modelling various geophysical phenomena, including the imposing classic phenomenon of earthquakes, employing various statistical physical ideas and techniques. This first book on statistical physics modelling of geophysical phenomena contains extensive reviews by almost all the leading experts in the field and should be widely useful to the graduate students and researchers in geoscience and statistical physics. It grew out of the lecture notes from a workshop on “Models of Earthquakes: Physics Approaches”, held in Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, under the auspices of its Centre for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science in December 2005. The book is divided in four parts. In the first part, tutorial materials are

introduced. Chakrabarti introduces the fracture nucleation processes, their (extreme) statistics in disordered solids, in fibre bundle models and in the two fractal overlap models of earthquakes. In the next two chapters, Hemmer et al. and Kun et al. review the avalanche or quake statistics and the breaking dynamics in simple (mean-field like) fibre bundle models and in their extended versions, respectively. Hansen and Mathiesen discuss the scale invariance

properties of the random and fractured surfaces. In part II, physics models of earthquake and their statistical analysis are discussed in detail. Burridge recounts some of the early and very successful attempts like the spring-block models. Bhattacharyya discusses the recently introduced geometric models of earthquakes and their successes in capturing the statistics. The solid–solid friction and stick-slip models of earthquakes are discussed next by Matsukawa and Saito. Corral puts forward an intriguing analysis of the statistical correlations in various observed catalogue data for earthquakes. Similar spatio-temporal correlations in data and their analysis in the context of spring-block models are discussed by Kawamura.