FRACTAL ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL EARTHQUAKE DATA

Abstract

This report presents a method to find a correlation, if any, of the earthquake occurrence in three different zones of the convergent plate boundaries in Pacific Plate region using the Iterated Function Systems (IFS). The earthquake data of last 48 years was acquired and the area of study was divided into four zones based on their tectonic similarity. The seismic events are arranged chronologically and are flagged according to the zone in which they occurred which resulted into a one dimensional time array for earthquakes according to their zones This one dimensional time array for different zones was then read as 1-bit, 4-bit and 8-bit fractal addresses by running a script written in Matlab. The images obtained depicted the correlation or non-correlation between different zones. The results are based on the past pattern of earthquakes in the study area and we can only determine the probability of the zone wise order occurrence in the future by comparing the visual results of chronological zone wise earthquake mapping