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Abstract Determining conditions for earthquake slip on faults is a key goal of fault mechanics highly relevant to seismic hazard. Previous studies have demonstrated that enhanced dynamic weakening (EDW) can lead to dynamic rupture of faults with much lower shear stress than required for rupture nucleation. We study the stress conditions before earthquake ruptures of different sizes that spontaneously evolve in numerical simulations of earthquake sequences on rate‐and‐state faults with EDW due to thermal pressurization of pore fluids. We find that average shear stress right before dynamic rupture (aka shear prestress) systematically varies with the rupture size. The smallest ruptures have prestress comparable to the local shear stress required for nucleation. Larger ruptures weaken the fault more, propagate over increasingly under‐stressed areas due to dynamic stress concentration, and result in progressively lower average prestress over the entire rupture. The effect is more significant in fault models with more efficient EDW. We find that, as a result, fault models with more efficient weakening produce fewer small events and result in systematically lower b‐values of the frequency‐magnitude event distributions. The findings (a) illustrate that large earthquakes can occur on faults that appear not to be critically stressed compared to stresses required for slip nucleation; (b) highlight the importance of finite‐fault modeling in relating the local friction behavior determined in the lab to the field scale; and (c) suggest that paucity of small events or seismic quiescence may be the observational indication of mature faults that operate under low shear stress due to EDW.
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Dynamic rupture initiation and propagation in a fluid-injection laboratory setup with diagnostics across multiple temporal scales
Fluids are known to trigger a broad range of slip events, from slow, creeping transients to dynamic earthquake ruptures. Yet, the detailed mechanics underlying these processes and the conditions leading to different rupture behaviors are not well understood. Here, we use a laboratory earthquake setup, capable of injecting pressurized fluids, to compare the rupture behavior for different rates of fluid injection, slow (megapascals per hour) versus fast (megapascals per second). We find that for the fast injection rates, dynamic ruptures are triggered at lower pressure levels and over spatial scales much smaller than the quasistatic theoretical estimates of nucleation sizes, suggesting that such fast injection rates constitute dynamic loading. In contrast, the relatively slow injection rates result in gradual nucleation processes, with the fluid spreading along the interface and causing stress changes consistent with gradually accelerating slow slip. The resulting dynamic ruptures propagating over wetted interfaces exhibit dynamic stress drops almost twice as large as those over the dry interfaces. These results suggest the need to take into account the rate of the pore-pressure increase when considering nucleation processes and motivate further investigation on how friction properties depend on the presence of fluids.
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- PAR ID:
- 10326639
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 118
- Issue:
- 51
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023433118
