Fractal Characterization of Earthquake occurrences in Nigeria

Abstract

Fractal characterization of Earthquake occurrences in Nigeria was carried out in order to know the b-value of tremor occurrences in the country. This will help in hazard analysis and research in the geological and geophysical structures of Nigeria. The method used in determining the b-value is the box counting method, but for simplicity, we used circle. The areas that are tremor prone were posted on a digitized Nigeria map using Google earth and Surfer 7.0 software. The computation with the box counting method was performed with picked radius of the circle from 50km - 350km and the average number of points that falls within each circle were recorded. The graph of log r (the logarithms of radius of circle or scale) against log <N> (logarithms of average number of points) was plotted using grapher and excels Microsoft word and the slope of the graph was determined. The determined slope gave the fractal dimension and the b-value was thus calculated. In this work, a b-value of 0.6 was obtained indicating that Nigeria falls within seismically less active zone.