Scaling in a nonconservative earthquake model of self-organized criticality - art. no. 046111

We numerically investigate the Olami-Feder-Christensen model for earthquake s in order to characterize its scaling behavior. We show that ordinary fini te size scaling in the model is violated due to global, system wide events. Nevertheless we find that subsystems of linear dimension small compared to the overall system size obey finite (subsystem) size scaling, with univers al critical coefficients, for the earthquake events localized within the su bsystem. We provide evidence, moreover, that large earthquakes responsible for breaking finite-size scaling are initiated predominantly near the bound ary.