A laboratory perspective on accelerating preparatory processes before earthquakes and implications for foreshock detectability.

Dynamic failure in the laboratory is commonly preceded by many foreshocks which accompany premonitory aseismic slip. Aseismic slip is also thought to govern earthquake nucleation in nature, yet, foreshocks are rare. Here, we examine how heterogeneity due to different roughness, damage and pore pressures affects premonitory slip and acoustic emission characteristics.

Fault roughness controls injection-induced seismicity.

Surface roughness ubiquitously prevails in natural faults across various length scales. Despite extensive studies highlighting the important role of fault geometry in the dynamics of tectonic earthquakes, whether and how fault roughness affects fluid-induced seismicity remains elusive. Here, we investigate the effects of fault geometry and stress heterogeneity on fluid-induced fault slip and associated seismicity characteristics using laboratory experiments and numerical modeling.

Months-long seismicity transients preceding the 2023 M 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake, Türkiye.

Short term prediction of earthquake magnitude, time, and location is currently not possible. In some cases, however, documented observations have been retrospectively considered as precursory. Here we present seismicity transients starting approx.

Large-scale heterogeneities can alter the characteristics of compressive failure and accelerated seismic release.

Externally stressed brittle rocks fail once the stress is sufficiently high. This failure is typically preceded by a pronounced increase in the total energy of acoustic emission (AE) events, the so-called accelerated seismic release. Yet, other characteristics of approaching the failure point such as the presence or absence of variations in the AE size distribution and, similarly, whether the failure point can be interpreted as a critical point in a statistical physics sense differs across experiments.

Spatial and temporal multiplet analysis for identification of dominant fluid migration path at The Geysers geothermal field, California.

Multiplet analysis is based on the identification of seismic events with very similar waveforms which are used then to enhance seismological analysis e.g. by precise relocation of sources.