The critical earthquake concept applied to mine rockbursts with time-to-failure analysis

We report new tests of the critical earthquake concepts performed on rockbursts in deep South African mines. We extend the concept of an optimal time and space correlation region and test it on the eight main shocks of our catalog provided by ISSI. In a first test, we use the simplest signature of criticality in terms of a power law time-to-failure formula. Notwithstanding the fact that the search for the optimal correlation size is performed with this simple power law, we find evidence both for accelerated seismicity and for the presence of logperiodic behavior with a prefered scaling factor close to 2. We then propose a new algorithm based on a space and time smoothing procedure, which is also intended to account for the finite range and time mechanical interactions between events. This new algorithm provides a much more robust and efficient construction of the optimal correlation region, which allows us the use of the logperiodic formula directly in the search process. In this preliminary work, we have only tested the new algorithm on the largest event on the catalog. The result is of remarkable good quality with a dramatic improvement in accuracy and robustness. This confirms the potential importance of logperiodic signals. Our study opens the road for an efficient implemention of a systematic testing procedure of real-time predictions. 22 pages, 32 figures