Related papers: Shake and sink: liquefaction without pressurizatio…

Nearly all aspects of earthquake rupture are controlled by the friction along the fault that progressively increases with tectonic forcing, but in general cannot be directly measured. We show that fault friction can be determined at any…

The starting point of the present review is to acknowledge that there are innumerable reports of non-seismic types of earthquake precursory phenomena that are intermittent and seem not to occur systematically, while associated reports are…

Computational earthquake sequence models provide generative estimates of the time, location, and size of synthetic seismic events that can be compared with observed earthquake histories and assessed as rupture forecasts. Here we describe a…

A reactive fluid dissolving the surface of a uniform fracture will trigger an instability in the dissolution front, leading to spontaneous formation of pronounced well-spaced channels in the surrounding rock matrix. Although the underlying…

In line of the intermediate-term monitoring of seismic activity aimed at prediction of the world largest earthquakes the seismic dynamics of the Earth's lithosphere is analysed as a single whole, which is the ultimate scale of the complex…

Porous sediments in geological systems are exposed to stress by the above-laying mass and consequent compaction, which may be significantly nonuniform across the massif. We derive scaling laws for the compaction of sediments of similar…

Theoretical approaches to earthquake instabilities propose shear dominated instabilities as a source mechanism. Here we take a fresh look at the role of possible volumetric instabilities preceding a shear instability. We investigate the…

Turbulence is ever produced in the low-viscosity/large-scale fluid flows by the velocity shears and, in unstable stratification, by buoyancy forces. It is commonly believed that both mechanisms produce the same type of chaotic motions,…

This chapter first presents a rather personal view of some different aspects of predictability, going in crescendo from simple linear systems to high-dimensional nonlinear systems with stochastic forcing, which exhibit emergent properties…

A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…

Characterizing the interaction between water and microscopic defects is one of the long-standing challenges in understanding a broad range of cracking processes. Different physical aspects of microscopic events, driven or influenced by…

Pressure solution is an important process in sedimentary basins, and its behaviour depends mainly on the sediment rheology and temperature distribution. The compaction relation of pressure solution is typically assumed to be a viscous one…

Desiccation cracking in clayey soils occurs when they lose moisture, leading to an increase in their compressibility and hydraulic conductivity and hence significant reduction of soil strength. The prediction of desiccation cracking in…

Erosion and deposition during flow through porous media can lead to large erosive bursts that manifest as jumps in permeability and pressure loss. Here we reveal that the cause of these bursts is the re-opening of clogged pores when the…

We first show that an earthquake of a geometrically infinite hyperbolic surface induces an asymptotically conformal change in the hyperbolic metric if and only if the measured lamination associated with the earthquake is asymptotically…

During the last twenty years, a number of publications of theoretical-numerical nature have appeared which come to the apparently-reassuring conclusion that seismic motion on the ground in cities is smaller than what this motion would be in…

Two laboratory scale experiments of dry and under-water avalanches of non-cohesive granular materials are investigated. We trigger solitary waves and study the conditions under which the front is transversally stable. We show the existence…

A general-purpose model combining concepts from rational continuum mechanics, fracture and damage mechanics, plasticity, and poromechanics is devised in Eulerian coordinates, involving objective time derivatives. The model complies with…

The efficiency of thermal pressurisation as a dynamic weakening mechanism relies on the thermal and hydraulic properties of the rocks forming the fault core. Here, we assess the effectiveness of thermal pressurisation by comparing…

The pressure distribution beneath a conical sandpile, created by pouring sand from a point source onto a rough rigid support, shows a pronounced minimum below the apex (`the dip'). Recent work of the authors has attempted to explain this…