Related papers: Acoustically-induced slip in sheared granular laye…
Friction plays a fundamental role in many natural processes, including earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes occur when highly compressed fault surfaces accumulate large enough shear stresses, causing the faults to…
I study a recently proposed statistical model of earthquake dynamics that incorporates aging as a fundamental ingredient. The model is known to generate earthquake sequences that quantitatively reproduce the spatial and temporal clustering…
Seismic faults release the stress accumulated during tectonic movement through rapid ruptures or slow slip events. The slow slip events play a crucial role in the seismic cycle as they impact the occurrence of earthquakes. However, the…
Tidal stress is a globally acting perturbation driven primarily by the gravitational forcing of the Moon and the Sun. Understanding how tidal stresses can trigger seismic events is essential for constraining tectonic environments that are…
Natural faults often contain a fluid-saturated, granular fault-gouge layer, whose failure and sliding processes play a central role in earthquake dynamics. Using a two-dimensional discrete element model coupled with fluid dynamics, we…
Studying the effect of mechanical perturbations on granular systems is crucial for understanding soil stability, avalanches, and earthquakes. We investigate a granular system as a laboratory proxy for fault gouge. When subjected to a slow…
We propose a theory of shear flow in dense granular materials. A key ingredient of the theory is an effective temperature that determines how the material responds to external driving forces such as shear stresses and vibrations. We show…
We report results of 3D Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations aiming at investigating the role of the boundary vibration in inducing frictional weakening in sheared granular layers. We study the role of different vibration amplitudes…
The frictional instability associated with earthquake initiation and earthquake dynamics is believed to be mainly controlled by the dynamics of fragmented rocks within the fault gauge. Principal features of the emerging seismicity (e.g.…
The way granular materials response to an applied shear stress is of the utmost relevance to both human activities and natural environment. One of the their most intriguing and less understood behavior, is the stick-instability, whose most…
Recent experiments indicate that frictional sliding occurs by the nucleation of detachment fronts at the contact interface that may appear well before the onset of global sliding. This intriguing precursory activity is not accounted for by…
The traction evolution is a fundamental ingredient to model the dynamics of an earthquake rupture which ultimately controls, during the coseismic phase, the energy release, the stress redistribution and the consequent excitation of seismic…
We study experimentally the fluctuations of deformation along a shear fault naturally emerging within a compressed frictional granular medium. Using laser interferometry, we show that the deformation inside this granular gouge occurs as a…
The unexpected weakness of some faults has been attributed to the emergence of acoustic waves that promote failure by reducing the confining pressure through a mechanism known as acoustic fluidization, also proposed to explain earthquake…
Frictional weakening by vibrations was first invoked in the 70's to explain unusual fault slips and earthquakes, low viscosity during the collapse of impact craters or the extraordinary mobility of sturzstroms, peculiar rock avalanches…
``Remote triggering" refers to the inducement of earthquakes by weak perturbations that emanate from far away sources, typically intense earthquakes that happen at much larger distances than their nearby aftershocks, sometimes even around…
Earthquakes induced during hydraulic fracturing operations have occurred in a number of locales. However, in-situ studies aimed to discern the triggering mechanism remains exclusively statistical in their nature. Here, we calculate the…
Even the most regular stick-slip frictional sliding is always stochastic, with irregularity in both the intervals between slip events and the sizes of the associated stress drops. Applying small-amplitude oscillations to the shear force, we…
Slow earthquakes differ from regular earthquakes in their slower moment release and size distribution dominated by smaller events. However, the physical origin of these slow earthquake statistics remains controversial. In this work, we…
Fault zones mature through the accumulation of earthquakes and the wearing of contact asperities at multiple scales. This study examines how wear-induced gouge production affects the evolution of fault seismicity, focusing on earthquake…