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    Coulomb pre-stress and fault bends are ignored yet vital factors for earthquake triggering and hazard

    Mildon, Z. and Roberts, Gerald P. and Faure Walker, J. and Toda, S. (2019) Coulomb pre-stress and fault bends are ignored yet vital factors for earthquake triggering and hazard. Nature Communications 10 (2744), ISSN 2041-1723.

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    Abstract

    Successive locations of individual large earthquakes (Mw>5.5) over years to centuries can be difficult to explain with simple Coulomb Stress Transfer (CST) because it is common for seismicity to circumvent nearest-neighbour along-strike faults where coseismic CST is greatest. We demonstrate that Coulomb pre-stress (the cumulative CST from multiple earthquakes and interseismic loading on non-planar faults) may explain this, evidenced by study of a 667-year historical record of earthquakes in central Italy. Heterogeneity in Coulomb pre-stresses across the fault system is >±50 bars, whereas coseismic CST is <±2 bars, so the latter will rarely overwhelm the former, explaining why historical earthquakes rarely rupture nearest neighbor faults. However, earthquakes do tend to occur where the cumulative coseismic and interseismic CST is positive, although there are notable examples where earthquake propagate across negatively stressed portions of faults. Hence Coulomb pre-stress calculated for non-planar faults is an ignored yet vital factor for earthquake triggering.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Natural Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Research in Environment and Sustainability, Centre for
    Depositing User: Gerald Roberts
    Date Deposited: 24 Jun 2019 12:46
    Last Modified: 09 May 2024 15:43
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27889

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