Abstract
Earthquakes occur when a system of grains within a fault line “fail” to elastically hold the stress applied to it by the tectonic plates. On smaller scales, these earthquakes are called avalanches. For my thesis, I have been analyzing granular systems similar to that found within the natural fault line in order to find microscopic and macroscopic properties of such granular system. By analyzing data of a computer generated system, a spin-1 Ising Model based off of the stresses on a grain could be defined and avalanche sizes could be classified. The combination of the microscopic and macroscopic gave further information for classifying avalanche sizes.