Premonitory acoustic emissions and stick-slip in natural and smooth-faulted Westerly granite

Preslip and cascade processes initiating laboratory stick slip

Recent modeling studies have explored whether earthquakes begin with a large aseismic nucleation process or initiate dynamically from the rapid growth of a smaller instability in a “cascade-up” process. To explore such a case in the laboratory, we study the initiation of dynamic rupture (stick slip) of a smooth saw-cut fault in a 76mm diameter cylindrical granite laboratory sample at 40–120MPa ...

Title Dynamic Weakening by Acoustic Fluidization during Stick -Slip Motion

Transition from stick-slip to smooth sliding: an earthquakelike model.

We present a detailed study of an earthquakelike model that exhibits a "transition" from stick-slip motion to smooth sliding at a velocity of the order of those observed in experiments. This contrasts with the many previous microscopic models in which the transition velocity is many orders of magnitude too large. The results show that experimentally observed smooth sliding at the macroscopic sc...

Dynamic Weakening by Acoustic Fluidization during Stick-Slip Motion.

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 remote triggering. Here we validate this mechanism via the numerical investigation of a granular fault model system. We find that the stick-slip dynamics is af...

Flatness and stick-slip stabilization

The origin of this report lies in the very interesting discussions with Chal-lamel of the CGES at Ecole des Mines de Paris and with Hugues Mounier of Ecole des Mines de Nantes.