Citation

Contoyiannis YF, Potirakis SM, Eftaxias K. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 2013; 13(1): 125-139.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Copernicus GmbH on behalf of the European Geosciences Union)

DOI

10.5194/nhess-13-125-2013

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The new field of complex systems supports the view that a number of systems arising from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, engineering, and economics may have certain quantitative features that are intriguingly similar. The Earth is a living planet where many complex systems run perfectly without stopping at all. The earthquake generation is a fundamental sign that the Earth is a living planet. Recently, analyses have shown that human-brain-type disease appears during the earthquake generation process. Herein, we show that human-heart-type disease appears during the earthquake preparation of the earthquake process. The investigation is mainly attempted by means of critical phenomena, which have been proposed as the likely paradigm to explain the origins of both heart electric fluctuations and fracture-induced electromagnetic fluctuations. We show that a time window of the damage evolution within the heterogeneous Earth's crust and the healthy heart's electrical action present the characteristic features of the critical point of a thermal second-order phase transition. A dramatic breakdown of critical characteristics appears in the tail of the fracture process of heterogeneous system and the injured heart's electrical action. Analyses by means of Hurst exponent and wavelet decomposition further support the hypothesis that a dynamical analogy exists between the geological and biological systems under study.