(İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2006-12) Yalçın, Sibel Ebru; Kurnaz, Levent
Earthquakes and aftershock sequences follow several empirical scaling laws: (1) Gutenberg-Richter
frequency-magnitude scaling, (2) Bi'ith's law for the magnitude of the largest aftershock, (3) The
modified Omori's law for the temporal decay of aftershocks. In this paper, "The Modified Form of
Bi'ith's Law" and its application to our KOERI data have been studied. Bi'ith's law states that the
differences in magnitudes between mainshocks and their largest aftershocks are approximately
constant, independent of the magnitudes of mainshocks. In the modified form of Bi'ith's law for a
given mainshock we get the inferred "largest" aftershock of this mainshock by using an extrapolation
of the Gutenberg-Richter frequency-magnitude statistics of the aftershock sequence. To test the
applicability of the modified form of Bi'ith's Law we consider i4 large earthquakes that occurred in
and near boundary neighbors of Turkey between i900 and 2004 with magnitudes equal to or greater
than ffims ~ 6.1. Because Turkey has different fault zones that have different properties, a
classification was needed for these earthquakes. Additional\y, in this study the partitioning of energy
during a mainshock-aftershock sequence was also calculated in two different ways. it is shown that
most of the energy is released in the mainshock. The constancy of the differences in magnitudes
between mainshocks and their largest aftershocks is an indication of scale-invariant behavior of
aftershock sequences.
