This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL083628. This is version 2 of this Preprint.
![Complex earthquake behavior on simple faults](/media/repos/1/40aab2d6-4c12-4d57-a93c-f005a57ea48c.jpg)
Downloads
Supplementary Files
Authors
Abstract
While power-law distributions in seismic moment and interevent times are ubiquitous in regional catalogs, the statistics of individual faults remains controversial. Continuum fault models typically produce characteristic earthquakes or a narrow range of sizes, leading to the view that the regional statistics originates from interaction of multiple faults.
I present theoretical arguments and numerical simulations demonstrating that seismicity on homogeneous planar faults can span several orders of magnitude in rupture dimensions and interevent times, if the fault dimension W is sufficiently large compared to a characteristic length Lcrit, related to the nucleation dimension. Large faults are increasingly less characteristic, with the fraction of system-size ruptures proportional to (Lcrit/W)^1/2. Earthquake statistics for large W/Lcrit is remarkably close to nature, exhibiting Omori decay and power-law distributed rupture lengths. Simple crack models are consistent with a Gutenberg-Richter distribution with b=3/4, and provide a physical basis for these distributions on individual faults.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/osf.io/hgbjx
Subjects
Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Keywords
Earthquake cycle simulations, earthquake physics, earthquake scaling laws
Dates
Published: 2019-05-11 01:19
Last Updated: 2020-07-15 06:24
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.