The rate- and state-dependent constitutive formulation for fault slip characterizes an exceptional variety of materials over a wide range of sliding conditions. This formulation provides a unified representation of diverse sliding phenomena including slip weakening over a characteristic sliding distance Dc, apparent fracture energy at a rupture front, time-dependent healing after rapid slip, an...

We defend Langmuir-like models of microarrays from accusations by Li et al (2010 Phys. Biol. 7 048001) that they fail to link sequence-specific properties to hybridization signals. We argue that existing Langmuir-like models based on accepted principles of physical chemistry, together with a model of post-hybridization washing, are entirely consistent with various controlled experiments. Li et ...

Overturned folds are observed in regions of the Greenland ice sheet where driving stress is highly variable. Three mechanisms have been proposed to explain these folds: freezing subglacial water, traveling basal slippery patches, and englacial rheological contrasts. Here we explore how traveling basal sticky patches can produce overturned folds. Transitions from low to high stress cause a trade...

S U M M A R Y We develop a frequency-based approach to earthquake slip inversion that requires no prior information on the rupture velocity or slip-rate functions. Because the inversion is linear and is performed separately at each frequency, it is computationally efficient and suited to imaging the finest resolvable spatial details of rupture. We demonstrate the approach on synthetic seismogra...

[1] We derived a coseismic slip model for the Mw 7.9 2008 Wenchuan earthquake on the basis of radar line‐of‐sight displacements from ALOS interferograms, GPS vectors, and geological field data. Available interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data provided a nearly complete coverage of the surface deformation along both ascending (fine beam mode) and descending orbits (ScanSAR to Scan...

Previous work has shown that velocity-weakening friction produces slip complexity in simple dynamical models of earthquake faults ( Carlson and Langer, 1989). Rere I show that a different type of dynamical instability, caused by slipweakening friction, also produces slip complexity. The deterministically chaotic slip complexity produced by slip-weakening friction in a simple one dimensional mod...

The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method has been popular as a numerical technique for solving the conservation laws of gas dynamics. In the present study, we develop an explicit modal DG scheme for multi-dimensional conservation laws on unstructured triangular meshes in conjunction with non-Newtonian implicit nonlinear coupled constitutive relations (NCCR). Special attention is given to how to t...

A puzzling phenomenon of ice-stream flow is the stick–slip motion displayed by Whillans Ice Stream (WIS), West Antarctica. In this study we test the hypothesis that the WIS stick–slip motion has features similar to those of other known stick–slip systems, and thus might be of the same origin. To do so, we adapt a simple mechanical model widely used in seismology to study classic stick–slip beha...

A unified slip model is developed, which predicts wall slip by either a disentanglement mechanism or by debonding mechanism, depending upon the adhesive energy of the wall-polymer pair. The model is based on the transient network theory, in which the activation processes of adsorption and desorption are considered to occur at the wall in parallel to the stretching of the adsorbed chains. It is ...

This study presents a dynamic-induced direct-shear model to investigate the dynamic triggering of frictional slip on simulated granular gouges. An incident P-wave is generated as a shear load and a normal stress is constantly applied on the gouge layer. The shear stress accumulates in the incident stage and the frictional slip occurs in the slip stage without the effect of the reflected wave. T...