RESEARCH

Earthquakes are self-organized systems characterized by very long periods of energy accumulation driven by the slow rates of crustal motion, and the sudden energy release during a series of correlated earthquake sequences. We investigate the patterns that can be recovered from the space and time occurrences of earthquakes to understand the underlying processes involved in their generation. In particular, we study the earthquake spatio-temporal behavior in the Philippines, which is situated in a highly active region of earthquake generation. 

The sandpile model is a discrete cellular automata model that illustrates how small, local disturbances can propagate to produce fat-tailed avalanche size distribution. The sandpile model is self-organized, and has been used to replicate the statistical distributions of natural hazard occurrences. The group investigates the spatial and temporal properties of the sandpile model and its variants to make them more apt for simulating the occurrences of bursty events in many physical systems.