State Vectors—A New Method for Seismicity Analysis

The concept of state vector stems from statistical physics, where it is usually used to describe the evolution of a continuum field in its way of coarse-graining. In this paper, the state vector is employed to depict the evolution of seismicity quantitatively, and some interesting results are presented The authors investigated some famous earthquake cases (e.g., the Haicheng earthquake, the Tangshan earthquake, the west Kunlun Mountains earthquake, etc.) and found that the state vectors evidently change prior to the occurrence of large earthquakes. Thus it is believed that the state vector can be used as a kind of precursor to predict large earthquakes.