Abstract
A present debate in geophysics is whether seismicity is a deterministic, nonperiodic process (“strong chaos”) or rather a process of self-organised criticality (“weak chaos”). For either strong or weak chaotic processes, one of the most used classification tools is the determination of fractal dimensions. However, the fractal dimensions of artificial deterministic and stochastic sequences generated to simulate seismicity are too close to permit discrimination. A new parameter, randomness, is introduced here in order to increase resolution. By using randomness together with fractal dimension it is shown that earthquake sequences seem to be closer to weak than to strong chaotic processes. This has clear implications in Engineering: if the crust is everywhere near a critical state then no fault can be deemed to be inactive; also, induced changes in local stress conditions can trigger earthquakes at far, apparently uncorrelated sites.
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