Hadrien Rattez, Emmanouil Veveakis

The triggering and magnitude of earthquakes is determined by the friction evolution along faults. Experimental results have revealed a drastic decrease of the friction coefficient for velocities close to the maximum seismic one, independently of the material studied. Due to the extreme loading conditions during seismic slip, many competing physical phenomena are occurring (like mineral decomposition, nanoparticle lubrication, melting among others) that are typically thermal in origin and are changing the nature of the material.

Here we show that a large set of experimental data for different rocks can be described by such thermally-activated mechanisms, combined with the production of weak phases. By taking under account the energy balance of all processes during fault movement, we present a framework that reconciles the data, and is capable of explaining the frictional behaviour of faults, across the full range of slip velocities.

The similarity of microstructures observed in nature and in experiments suggests that energetic frameworks like the one presented could quantitatively link observations across the scales and provide deep, physics-based insight on the physical mechanisms driving seismic slip.