Time-reversibility in seismic sequences: Application to the seismicity of Mexican subduction zone

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the time-reversibility of series associated with the seismicity of five seismic areas of the subduction zone beneath the Southwest Pacific Mexican coast, applying the horizontal visibility graph method to the series of earthquake magnitudes, interevent times, interdistances and magnitude increments. We applied the Kullback–Leibler divergence D that is a metric for quantifying the degree of time-irreversibility in time series. Our findings suggest that among the five seismic areas, Jalisco–Colima is characterized by time-reversibility in all the four seismic series. Our results are consistent with the peculiar seismo-tectonic characteristics of Jalisco–Colima, which is the closest to the Middle American Trench and belongs to the Mexican volcanic arc.