Fundamentals of the Phenomenological Theory of Earthquakes

Phenomenology is a unity of principles and methods for investigating the essence of phenomena. This article is a brief review of a series of works carried out by the authors over the past ten years. The general thrust of the works is that phenomenological ideas of physics are used to analyze earthquakes. A perfect model of phenomenological theory is thermodynamics. Maxwell’s electrodynamics is also a perfect example of phenomenological theory. Earthquake phenomenology is still far from reaching that level. In the system of rational knowledge of geodynamics, we have so far reached the status of a preliminary view of the subject, methods, and tasks of the future phenomenological theory of earthquakes. Nevertheless, already at this stage it is clearly visible the perspective of the proposed approach to the construction of the theory. The article shows by concrete examples that it is useful to use phenomenological representations of general physics when searching for the bases of the theory and when processing and analyzing specific manifestations of seismicity.