Realistic time correlations in sandpiles

A "sandpile" cellular automaton achieves complex temporal correlations, like a 1/f spectrum, if the position where it is perturbed diffuses slowly rather than changing completely at random, showing that the spatial correlations of the driving are deeply related to the intermittent activity. Hence, recent arguments excluding the relevance of self-organized criticality in seismicity and in other contexts are inaccurate. As a toy model of single fault evolution, and despite of its simplicity, our automaton uniquely reproduces the scaling form of the broad distributions of waiting times between earthquakes.