Advances in Conception about Earthquakes - Earthquake Engineering for Structural Design - page 123

place. So, new equilibrium losses can be produced at the same or in a new position
along the fault.
Using these concepts, the solution of dynamic equilibrium equations is
obtained by discrimination, by introducing a time step. Computational experiments
show (Digas et al, 2001) that the block models of the lithosphere dynamics are
quite time-and memory-consuming on sequential computers, so that it does not
allow the simulation of the dynamics of complicated systems with a large number
of blocks. However, the approach applied for modeling admits the parallelization
of calculations on a multiprocessor machine, using a parallel algorithm for
numerical simulation. This fact makes it realistic to pass to a system of tectonic
plates in the global scale (Rozenberg et al, 2002).
The South American region, composed by South America, Caribbean, Cocos
and Nazca plates, was studied by Digas et al, (2001) and Rozenberg et al, (2002).
The surrounding plates, North America, Africa, Antarctica and Pacific, are treated
as boundary blocks. Between the obtained synthetic results and the recorded
earthquakes a very good correspondence is obtained (Fig. 4.13)
Using the concept of block equilibrium and parallel technologies, some very
interesting applications were performed. The blocks system of the Vrancea
(Romania) subduction zone has been studied by Soloviev (2001) and Rozenberg et
al (2002). Figure 4.14 shows the main structural elements of the Vrancea blocks

East-
European

Intra-Alpine

BlackSea

Moesian

Figure 4.14 Simulation of Vrancea (Romania) earthquakes
(modified after Rozenberg et al, 2002)