Small world in a seismic network: the California case

Abstract. Recent work has shown that disparate systems can be described as complex networks i.e. assemblies of nodes and links with nontrivial topological properties. Examples include technological, biological and social systems. Among them, earthquakes have been studied from this perspective. In the present work, we divide the Southern California region into cells of 0.1°, and calculate the correlation of activity between them to create functional networks for that seismic area, in the same way that the brain activity is studied from the complex network perspective. We found that the network shows small world features.