Accelerating deformation seismicity patterns before the March 3, 2021 Thessaly strong earthquake. First results

Abstract

A widely felt strong shallow earthquake with Mw 6.3 magnitude occurred in Thessaly (Central Greece) on March 3, 2021. This recent strong event attracted our interest to apply and evaluate the capabilities of the Accelerating Deformation method. Based on the recently proposed generalized Benioff strain idea which could be justified by the terms of Non-Extensive Statistical Physics (NESP), the common critical exponent was calculated in order to define the critical stage before a strong event. The present analysis comprised a complex spatiotemporal iterative procedure to examine the possible seismicity patterns at a broad region and identify the best one associated with the preparation process before the strong event. The starting time of the accelerating period, the size and location of the critical area are unknown parameters to be determined. Furthermore, although, the time of failure is already known, in the present research it was not set as a fixed value in the algorithm to define the other unknown parameters but instead different catalogue ending dates have been tried out to be with an objective way. The broad region to be investigated was divided with a square mesh and the search of events around a point has been carried on with different size circular and elliptical shapes. Among the obtained results, the solution which exhibits the most dominant scaling law behavior as well as the one which exhibits the smallest spatial area and yet the more dominant scaling law behavior are presented.

Seismicity Patterns Prior to the Thessaly (Mw6.3) Strong Earthquake on 3 March 2021 in Terms of Multiresolution Wavelets and Natural Time Analysis

“…The results demonstrated that regional seismicity approached criticality a few days before the M w 6.3 earthquake that occurred on 3 March 2021 in the Thessaly region, in agreement with the results in [57]. In other words, the curve of the power spectrum, Π(φ), in the natural time domain that characterizes the evolution of the regional seismicity, coincided with the theoretical curve of critical point phenomena a few days before the M w 6.3 mainshock, in a similar way to that of non-equilibrium critical systems.…”

Shear-wave splitting perspectives from the intense aftershock sequence of Damasi – Tyrnavos

“…were observed [Valkaniotis et al 2021;Papathanassiou et al, 2022], the earthquakes have been attributed to a blind fault [Chatzipetros et al, 2021;Pavlides and Sboras, 2021]. The wealth of data sparked new interest in the area, with several aspects of the sequence having been studied, such as accelerating deformation seismicity patterns [Chatzopoulos, 2021] and earthquake early warning [Spingos et al, 2021].…”

The Evolution of Preseismic Patterns Related to the Central Crete (Mw6.0) Strong Earthquake on 27 September 2021 Revealed by Multiresolution Wavelets and Natural Time Analysis

“…Strong arguments suggest that the earthquake generation process can be considered as a critical point phenomenon that culminates with a large event, which is the critical point [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. New findings regarding the complex dynamics that characterize various geodynamic phenomena illustrate stimulating features in the framework of new concepts, such as that of non-extensive statistical physics [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], multiresolution wavelets analysis [25][26][27] and of the novel time domain, termed as natural time [22,23,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”