Natural earthquake fault systems are highly nonhomogeneous. The inhomogeneities occur because the earth is made of a variety of materials which hold and dissipate stress differently. In this work, we study scaling in earthquake fault models which are variations of the Olami-Feder-Christensen and Rundle-Jackson-Brown models. We use the scaling to explore the effect of spatial inhomogeneities due to damage and inhomogeneous stress dissipation in the earthquake-fault-like systems when the stress transfer range is long, but not necessarily longer than the length scale associated with the inhomogeneities of the system. We find that the scaling depends not only on the amount of damage, but also on the spatial distribution of that damage.

• Received 19 January 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.87.022809