Creep fronts and complexity in laboratory earthquake sequences illuminate delayed earthquake triggering

Sara Beth L. Cebry, Chun-Yu Ke, Srisharan Shreedharan, Chris Marone, David S. Kammer and Gregory C. McLaskey ()
Additional contact information
Sara Beth L. Cebry: Cornell University
Chun-Yu Ke: Cornell University
Srisharan Shreedharan: Pennsylvania State University
Chris Marone: Pennsylvania State University
David S. Kammer: Institute for Building Materials, ETH Zurich
Gregory C. McLaskey: Cornell University

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Earthquakes occur in clusters or sequences that arise from complex triggering mechanisms, but direct measurement of the slow subsurface slip responsible for delayed triggering is rarely possible. We investigate the origins of complexity and its relationship to heterogeneity using an experimental fault with two dominant seismic asperities. The fault is composed of quartz powder, a material common to natural faults, sandwiched between 760 mm long polymer blocks that deform the way 10 meters of rock would behave. We observe periodic repeating earthquakes that transition into aperiodic and complex sequences of fast and slow events. Neighboring earthquakes communicate via migrating slow slip, which resembles creep fronts observed in numerical simulations and on tectonic faults. Utilizing both local stress measurements and numerical simulations, we observe that the speed and strength of creep fronts are highly sensitive to fault stress levels left behind by previous earthquakes, and may serve as on-fault stress meters.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34397-0 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:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-34397-0

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34397-0

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 ().