Statistics and Triggering of Earthquakes

Naylor, M. (Invited speaker)

School of Geosciences

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in conference

Period	2013
Event type	Workshop
Location	Banff, CanadaShow on map

Documents & Links

The main goal of the workshop is to build and strengthen newly emerging links between active research groups in different scientific areas – statistics/probability, mathematics, physics, geodesy and seismology – toward achieving improved predictive understanding of seismicity patterns and structures and a physical theory for earthquake dynamics. The workshop will highlight the key role of the mathematical sciences in studying seismicity dynamics in relation to properties of faults and the crust as an essential component of this interdisciplinary research endeavor. The list of invitees reflects this diversity and includes senior and junior experts from different scientific areas. The ever-increasing threat to humanity from earthquakes in industrial and highly populated areas prompts for active cross-disciplinary earthquake research and justifies the necessity of this focused workshop. The workshop would be organized as a part of the international program Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 under the auspices of Banff International Research Station with support from the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (via the Commission on Mathematical Geophysics, President: Y. Ben-Zion). The specific short-term goals of the workshop are (1) Critical assessment of the recent arguments put forward in favor of dynamical and static earthquake stress triggering and the related sampling problems. This has direct implications for the statistical inference of triggering relationships and the identification of background seismicity. (2) Comparative review of the classical and recently developed statistical triggering detection methods, leading to future synergistic developments and bridging the existing statistical approaches with a physical insight. (3) Discussion of the key issues in sampling, experiment design, and error propagation that affect the current studies of earthquakes and faults on local (fault zone specific) and regional scales. (4) Consideration and comparison of different model approaches to simulate and study earthquake processes.