Delayed self-organized criticality and earthquake modeling

Delayed self-organized criticality is defined. It is shown to preserve the power-law behavior of self-organized criticality with a significant change in the exponents. A delayed version of the Ito—Matsuzaki model for earthquakes is constructed and studied. This model explains some fractal features of earthquakes as well as the Gutenberg-Richter and Omori laws. Furthermore theb value obtained from the delayed model is closer to observations than theb value of the undelayed model.