Dynamic nucleation as a cascade-up of earthquakes depending on rupture propagation velocity

Abstract

Earthquake dynamic rupture requires a nucleation process to provide sufficient energy to overcome the fracture energy. Large earthquakes may occur via a cascading rupture process, which includes many triggering processes that cascade from small to large sections of the fault system. During such a process, the nucleation of a large section of the fault plane may occur dynamically via the propagating rupture from a small section of the fault plane. A quasi-static view of seismic nucleation has been widely discussed in earthquake seismology; however, the dynamic nucleation process remains poorly known. Here, we investigate one aspect of the dynamic nucleation process by focusing on the rupture propagation velocity during the nucleation process. We simplify this process as self-similar crack propagation at a constant rupture velocity in a finite nucleation zone within a target region that possesses a uniform fracture energy. We numerically solve this elastodynamic problem in two dimensions for both the anti-plane and in-plane cases using the Boundary Integral Equation method. As the rupture velocity increases, the critical ratio of the fracture energy step to continue the rupture increases and the critical size of the dynamic nucleation zone decreases. The rapid increase in the ratio of the fracture energy step toward infinity could explain why earthquakes never propagate at slow rupture velocities. However, the effect on the size of the nucleation zone is rather limited, with the size of the dynamic nucleation zone decreasing to ~ 70% of the static nucleation zone size. However, such a small difference would result in a significant overall difference if such a dynamic nucleation process repeatedly occurred in the cascading rupture process of a large earthquake, which would be a difficult situation for earthquake early warning.Graphical