How Earthquakes Grow from a Tiny Fracture to a Catastrophic Event – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

Our understanding of the governing laws of seismic phenomena has advanced considerably and it is now possible to explain various features with numerical simulations using experiment-based friction laws. However, for the earthquake growth process in which a small rupture grows into a catastrophic event, various observable characteristics cannot be explained using only existing friction laws. The key to explaining these characteristics is the hierarchical heterogeneous structure that exists in the earthquake-producing region and the process of starting from a small scale and growing into larger events, the so-called cascade-up process.

In Palgunadi et al. [2024], such hierarchical heterogeneity is represented by a large number of fracture units distributed in 3-dimensional space, and the cascade-up process within the hierarchical heterogeneity is demonstrated using state-of-the-art computational techniques. The key assumption is that the energy of each individual fracture unit is scale-dependent, thereby successfully reproducing the earthquake growth process and seismic wave emission in a manner close to the observed facts. This is the most complex and realistic of similar studies to date, and more detailed studies in the future will advance our understanding of the earthquake growth process.

Citation: Palgunadi, K. H., Gabriel, A.-A., Garagash, D. I., Ulrich, T., & Mai, P. M. (2024). Rupture dynamics of cascading earthquakes in a multiscale fracture network. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 129, e2023JB027578. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JB027578

—Satoshi Ide, Editor, JGR: Solid Earth

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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