Methods of Statistical Physics Applied to Seismology

The understanding of seismic phenomena is of crucial importance in engineering and in social geophysical and geological sciences. Despite the vast existing knowledge about the seismic waves produced by landslides on failures much remains to be discovered about the dynamics responsible for these events. The general belief in seismic theory is that the relationship between events that are located far apart is hard to be understood/demonstrated. However we live today in a world where data is being collected on most aspects of our lives and better yet computer power is cheaply available for analyzing such data. When we apply the computer power to the data we open a series of possibilities to look for patterns in the data. The work on seismic data analysis is no different; we have now large collections of millions of seismic events from around the world each deserving deeper analysis. In this book we have examined the seismic phenomena under the viewpoint of complex networks and we have found some evidence that points to small-world characteristics in the existing data on seismic events.