Insights on earthquake triggering processes from early aftershocks of repeating microearthquakes

Characterizing the evolution of seismicity rate of early aftershocks can yield important information about earthquake nucleation and triggering. However, this task is challenging because early aftershock seismic signals are obscured by those of the mainshock. Previous studies of early aftershocks employed high-pass filtering and template matching but had limited performance and completeness at very short times. Here we take advantage of repeating events previously identified on the San Andreas Fault at Parkfield and apply empirical Green's function deconvolution techniques. Both Landweber and sparse deconvolution methods reveal the occurrence of aftershocks as early as few tenths of a second after the mainshock. These events occur close to their mainshock, within one to two rupture lengths away. The aftershock rate derived from this enhanced catalog is consistent with Omori's law, with no flattening of the aftershock rate down to the shortest resolvable timescale ∼0.3 s. The early aftershock rate decay determined here matches seamlessly the decay at later times derived from the original earthquake catalog, yielding a continuous aftershock decay over timescales spanning nearly 8 orders of magnitude. Aftershocks of repeating microearthquakes may hence be governed by the same mechanisms from the earliest time resolved here, up to the end of the aftershock sequence. Our results suggest that these early aftershocks are triggered by relatively large stress perturbations, possibly induced by aseismic afterslip with very short characteristic time. Consistent with previous observations on bimaterial faults, the relative location of early aftershocks shows asymmetry along strike, persistent over long periods

Post-injection normal closure of fractures as a mechanism for induced seismicity

Understanding the controlling mechanisms underlying injection-induced seismicity is important for optimizing reservoir productivity and addressing seismicity-related concerns related to hydraulic stimulation in Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Hydraulic stimulation enhances permeability through elevated pressures, which cause normal deformations, and the shear slip of pre-existing fractures. Previous experiments indicate that fracture deformation in the normal direction reverses as the pressure decreases, e.g., at the end of stimulation. We hypothesize that this normal closure of fractures enhances pressure propagation away from the injection region and significantly increases the potential for post-injection seismicity. To test this hypothesis, hydraulic stimulation is modeled by numerically coupling fracture deformation, pressure diffusion and stress alterations for a synthetic geothermal reservoir in which the flow and mechanics are strongly affected by a complex three-dimensional fracture network. The role of the normal closure of fractures is verified by comparing simulations conducted with and without the normal closure effect

Decay and expansion of the early aftershock activity following the 2011, M_w9.0 Tohoku earthquake

The 2011, M_w9.0 Tohoku earthquake was followed by an abundant amount of seismicity providing a unique opportunity to analyze the triggering mechanism of great earthquakes. Although the Tohoku earthquake occurred close to a dense seismic network, many aftershocks that occurred in the first few hours after the mainshock are not recorded in the earthquake catalogs. Here we use a template waveform approach to recover as many as possible missing events in the first 12 hours following the Tohoku mainshock. Our analysis is able to detect about 1.4 times more events than those listed in the High Sensitivity Seismograph (Hi-net) earthquake catalog. Combining our new dataset with earthquakes that occurred at latter times, we are able to observe a continuous decay of the aftershock rate and along strike expansion of aftershock area. We relate the latter observation to the occurrence of post-seismic slip over the deep interface

Downscaling of fracture energy during brittle creep experiments

We present mode 1 brittle creep fracture experiments along fracture surfaces that contain strength heterogeneities. Our observations provide a link between smooth macroscopic time-dependent failure and intermittent microscopic stress-dependent processes. We find the large-scale response of slow-propagating subcritical cracks to be well described by an Arrhenius law that relates the fracture speed to the energy release rate. At the microscopic scale, high-resolution optical imaging of the transparent material used (PMMA) allows detailed description of the fracture front. This reveals a local competition between subcritical and critical propagation (pseudo stick-slip front advances) independently of loading rates. Moreover, we show that the local geometry of the crack front is self-affine and the local crack front velocity is power law distributed. We estimate the local fracture energy distribution by combining high-resolution measurements of the crack front geometry and an elastic line fracture model. We show that the average local fracture energy is significantly larger than the value derived from a macroscopic energy balance. This suggests that homogenization of the fracture energy is not straightforward and should be taken cautiously. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results in the context of fault mechanics

Interplay of seismic and aseismic deformations during earthquake swarms: An experimental approach

Observations of earthquake swarms and slow propagating ruptures on related faults suggest a close relation between the two phenomena. Earthquakes are the signature of fast unstable ruptures initiated on localized asperities while slow aseismic deformations are experienced on large stable segments of the fault plane. The spatial proximity and the temporal coincidence of both fault mechanical responses highlight the variability of fault rheology. However, the mechanism relating earthquakes and aseismic processes is still elusive due to the difficulty of imaging these phenomena of large spatiotemporal variability at depth. Here we present laboratory experiments that explore, in great detail, the deformation processes of heterogeneous interfaces in the brittle-creep regime. We track the evolution of an interfacial crack over 7 orders of magnitude in time and 5 orders of magnitude in space using optical and acoustic sensors. We explore the response of the system to slow transient loads and show that slow deformation episodes are systematically accompanied by acoustic emissions due to local fracture energy disorder. Features of acoustic emission activities and deformation rate distributions of our experimental system are similar to those in natural faults. On the basis of an activation energy model, we link our results to the Rate and State friction model and suggest an active role of local creep deformation in driving the seismic activity of earthquake swarms

Imbricated slip rate processes during slow slip transients imaged by low-frequency earthquakes

Low Frequency Earthquakes (LFEs) often occur in conjunction with transient strain episodes, or Slow Slip Events (SSEs), in subduction zones. Their focal mechanism and location consistent with shear failure on the plate interface argue for a model where LFEs are discrete dynamic ruptures in an otherwise slowly slipping interface. SSEs are mostly observed by surface geodetic instruments with limited resolution and it is likely that only the largest ones are detected. The time synchronization of LFEs and SSEs suggests that we could use the recorded LFEs to constrain the evolution of SSEs, and notably of the geodetically-undetected small ones. However, inferring slow slip rate from the temporal evolution of LFE activity is complicated by the strong temporal clustering of LFEs. Here we apply dedicated statistical tools to retrieve the temporal evolution of SSE slip rates from the time history of LFE occurrences in two subduction zones, Mexico and Cascadia, and in the deep portion of the San Andreas fault at Parkfield. We find temporal characteristics of LFEs that are similar across these three different regions. The longer term episodic slip transients present in these datasets show a slip rate decay with time after the passage of the SSE front possibly as t^(−1/4). They are composed of multiple short term transients with steeper slip rate decay as t^(−α) with α between 1.4 and 2. We also find that the maximum slip rate of SSEs has a continuous distribution. Our results indicate that creeping faults host intermittent deformation at various scales resulting from the imbricated occurrence of numerous slow slip events of various amplitudes

Thermally activated crack fronts propagating in pinning disorder: simultaneous brittle/creep behavior depending on scale

We study theoretically the propagation of a crack front in mode I along an interface in a disordered elastic medium, with a numerical model considering a thermally activated rheology, toughness disorder, and long range elastic interactions. This model reproduces the large scale dynamics of the crack front position in fast or creep loading regimes, but also the small scale self-affine behavior of the front. Two different scaling laws are predicted for the front morphology, with a Hurst exponent of 0.5 at small scales, and a logarithmic scaling law at large scales, consistently with experiments. The prefactor of these scaling laws is expressed as function of the temperature, and of the quenched disorder characteristics. The cross-over between these regimes is expressed as function of the quenched disorder amplitude, is proportional to the average energy release rate, and to the inverse of temperature. This model captures as well the experimentally observed local velocity fluctuations probability distribution, with a high velocity tail $P(v) \sim v^{-2.6}$. This feature is shown to arise when the quenched disorder is sufficiently large, whereas smaller toughness fluctuations lead to a lognormal-like velocity distribution. Overall, the system is shown to obey a scaling determined by two distinct mechanisms as function of scale: namely, the large scales display fluctuations similar to an elastic line in an annealed noise excited as the average front travels through the pinning landscape, while small scales display a balance between thresholds in possible elastic forces and quenched disorder

Downscaling of fracture energy during brittle creep experiments

We present mode 1 brittle creep fracture experiments along fracture surfaces that contain strength heterogeneities. Our observations provide a link between smooth macroscopic time-dependent failure and intermittent microscopic stress-dependent processes. We find the large-scale response of slow-propagating subcritical cracks to be well described by an Arrhenius law that relates the fracture speed to the energy release rate. At the microscopic scale, high-resolution optical imaging of the transparent material used (PMMA) allows detailed description of the fracture front. This reveals a local competition between subcritical and critical propagation (pseudo stick-slip front advances) independently of loading rates. Moreover, we show that the local geometry of the crack front is self-affine and the local crack front velocity is power law distributed. We estimate the local fracture energy distribution by combining high-resolution measurements of the crack front geometry and an elastic line fracture model. We show that the average local fracture energy is significantly larger than the value derived from a macroscopic energy balance. This suggests that homogenization of the fracture energy is not straightforward and should be taken cautiously. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results in the context of fault mechanics. Copyright © 2011 by the American Geophysical Union

Average crack-front velocity during subcritical fracture propagation in a heterogeneous medium.

We study the average velocity of crack fronts during stable interfacial fracture experiments in a heterogeneous quasibrittle material under constant loading rates and during long relaxation tests. The transparency of the material (polymethylmethacrylate) allows continuous tracking of the front position and relation of its evolution to the energy release rate. Despite significant velocity fluctuations at local scales, we show that a model of independent thermally activated sites successfully reproduces the large-scale behavior of the crack front for several loading conditions