Footprints of nonextensive Tsallis statistics, selfaffinity and universality in the preparation of the L’Aquila earthquake hidden in a pre-seismic EM emission

Abstract

Fracture induced physical fields allow a real-time monitoring of damage evolution in materials during mechanical loading. We investigate the preparation of the recently occurred L’Aquila earthquake in terms of a detected precursory electromagnetic anomaly. The precursor is well described by a recently introduced model for earthquake dynamics, which has been rooted in a nonextensive Tsallis framework starting from first principles. The analysis in terms of nonextensivity implies that the well established aspect of self-affine nature of faulting and fracture is hidden into the precursor, namely, the activation of the L’Aquila fault is a reduced self-affine image of the regional seismicity covering many geological faults. The Gutenberg–Richter magnitude–frequency relationship, the best known scaling relation for earthquakes, verifies the results based on nonextensivity. The latter suggests that the activation of the L’Aquila fault is a magnified image of the laboratory seismicity by means of acoustic and electromagnetic emissions. Finally, we present evidence for universality in magnetic storm, earthquake, and electromagnetic precursor occurrence by means of complexity and nonextensivity.