Acoustic Emission Monitoring of the Syracuse Athena Temple: Scale Invariance in the Timing of Ruptures

Abstract

We perform a comparative statistical analysis between the acoustic-emission time series from the ancient Greek Athena temple in Syracuse and the sequence of nearby earthquakes. We find an apparent association between acoustic-emission bursts and the earthquake occurrence. The waiting-time distributions for acoustic-emission and earthquake time series are described by a unique scaling law indicating self-similarity over a wide range of magnitude scales. This evidence suggests a correlation between the aging process of the temple and the local seismic activity.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Correlation between acoustic and other forms of energy emissions from fracture phenomena

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Measuring and localizing acoustic emission events in snow prior to fracture

“…In other quasi-brittle materials such as concrete (Ohtsu, 1996) or wood (Bucur, 2006) the AE technique is commonly used to study and predict failure processes (Johansen and Sornette, 2000). In the field of natural hazards, acoustic signals have been used to investigate earthquake occurrence (Niccolini et al, 2011) and to predict the collapse of a limestone cliff (Amitrano et al, 2005;Got et al, 2010). Girard et al (2012) set up an acoustic sensor network in order to predict failure within rocks and permafrost.…”

Creep rupture as a non-homogeneous Poissonian process

“…The acoustic waves generated by the nucleation and propagation of cracks allow for the monitoring of the failure process on the meso- and micro scales. Crackling noise is usually characterized by the integrated statistics accumulating all the events of the time series up to failure234567891011121314. Experiments revealed that the probability distribution of the energy of crackling bursts and of the interoccurrence times have power law functional form, which are considered to be the fingerprint of correlations in the microscopic breaking dynamics1234567891011121314.…”

“…Crackling noise is usually characterized by the integrated statistics accumulating all the events of the time series up to failure234567891011121314. Experiments revealed that the probability distribution of the energy of crackling bursts and of the interoccurrence times have power law functional form, which are considered to be the fingerprint of correlations in the microscopic breaking dynamics1234567891011121314. The value of the exponents measured on different types of heterogenous materials show a surprisingly large scatter between 1 and 2 which has not been captured by theoretical studies12345678910.…”