The application of the modified form of bath's law to the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ), Aegean Graben System and Cyprus Arc Zone

Abstract

Earthquakes and aftershock sequences follow several empirical scaling laws: One of these laws is Bath's law for the magnitude of the largest aftershock. In this thesis, Modified Form of Bath's Law and its application to KOERI data have been studied. Bath's law states that the differences in magnitudes between mainshocks and their largest detected aftershocks are approximately constant, independent of the magni tudes of mainshocks and it is about 1:2. In the modified form of Bath's law for a given mainshock we get the inferred largest aftershock of this mainshock by using an extrapolation of the Gutenberg-Richter frequency magnitude statistics of the aftershock sequence. To test the applicability of this modified law, 14 large earthquakes that occurred in and near boundary neighbors of Turkey between 1900 and 2004 with magnitudes equal to or greater than mms, 6:1 have been considered. Because Turkey has different fault zones that have different properties, a classification was needed for these earthquakes. Additionally, in this study the partitioning of energy during a mainshock aftershock sequence was also calculated in two different ways. It is shown that most of the energy is released in the mainshock. Additionally, the constancy of the differences in magnitudes between mainshocks and their largest aftershocks is an indication of scale-invariant behavior of aftershock sequences.