Abstract:
Bath’s law is an empirical law which says that any mainshock is followed by an aftershock approximately 1.2 less than its mainshock in magnitude, regardless of mainshock magnitude. In modified form of Bath’s law, we infer the largest aftershock of a mainshock from an extrapolation of the Gutenberg-Richter statistics. In this thesis, application of the modified version of the Bath’s law to the fault zones in Turkey, and nearby countries, and to the San Andreas Fault Zone in California was studied. We considered 41 earthquakes occuring in and near Turkey between 1900 and 2005 with magnitude equal to or greater than mms 5.7. The earthquake catalogs that are provided by Boğaziçi University Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute were used in this application. Nine large earthquakes that occured in California between 1987 and 2003 with magnitudes equal to or greater than mms 5.5 were also considered. For California region, earthquake catalogs that are provided by the Southern California Earthquake Center, Southern California Seismic Network catalog, and the Northern California Earthquake Data Center, Northern California Seismic Network catalog were used. We also categorized the mainshocks according to their fault zones. It was concluded that the modified form of Bath’s law is not applicable to the fault zones in Turkey.
