The pattern recognition method applied to the forecast of strong earthquakes in South American seismic prone areas

Typescript (photocopy).The pattern recognition method is applied to the Andean seismic region that extends from southern latitudes 2° to 27° in the South American continent, to set a criterion for the prediction of the potential sites of strong earthquakes epicenters in the zone. It is assumed that two hypothesis hold. First, the strong earthquake epicenters typically cluster around the intersection of morphostructural lineaments. Second, the rules of recognition obtained for neighboring zones which exhibit distinctive neotectonic evolution, state of stress, spatial earthquake distribution and geological development, may be different in spite of the fact that the morphostructural zoning does not reflect a separation between them. Hence, the region is divided into two broad-scale tectonic segments located above slabs of similar scale in the Nazca plate in which subduction takes place almost subhorizontally (dipping at an angle of about 10°) between latitudes 2°S and 15°S, and at a steeper angle (of approximately 30°) within latitudes 15°S to 27°S. The morphostructural zoning is carried out for both zones with the determination of the lineaments and the corresponding disjunctive knots which are defined as the objects of recognition when applying the pattern recognition method. The Cora-3 algorithm is used as the computational procedure for the search of the rule of recognition of dangerous and non dangerous sites for each zone. The set criteria contain in each case several characteristic features that represent the topography, geology and tectonics of each region. Also, it is shown that they have a physical meaning that mostly reflects the style of tectonic deformation in the related regions. The stability of the rules and the reliability of the method are extensively checked through several control experiments