The influence of the brittle-ductile transition zone on aftershock and foreshock occurrence

Giuseppe Petrillo, Eugenio Lippiello (), François P. Landes and Alberto Rosso
Additional contact information
Giuseppe Petrillo: University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”
Eugenio Lippiello: University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”
François P. Landes: Univ. Paris-Sud, CNRS, INRIA, Université Paris-Saclay
Alberto Rosso: CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Aftershock occurrence is characterized by scaling behaviors with quite universal exponents. At the same time, deviations from universality have been proposed as a tool to discriminate aftershocks from foreshocks. Here we show that the change in rheological behavior of the crust, from velocity weakening to velocity strengthening, represents a viable mechanism to explain statistical features of both aftershocks and foreshocks. More precisely, we present a model of the seismic fault described as a velocity weakening elastic layer coupled to a velocity strengthening visco-elastic layer. We show that the statistical properties of aftershocks in instrumental catalogs are recovered at a quantitative level, quite independently of the value of model parameters. We also find that large earthquakes are often anticipated by a preparatory phase characterized by the occurrence of foreshocks. Their magnitude distribution is significantly flatter than the aftershock one, in agreement with recent results for forecasting tools based on foreshocks.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16811-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-16811-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16811-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().