Introduction to stress triggers, stress shadows and their implications for seismic hazard in Indonesia

Abstract

Many aspects of earthquake mechanics remain an enigma, e.g.: earthquake interaction and seismic hazard mitigation. One potential bright spot is the finding that simple calculations of stress changes may explain some earthquake occurrences and interactions. This progress is especially lead by abundant studies of stress changes of human-induced seismicity. This work introduces stress triggers, stress shadows, and their implications for seismic hazard in Indonesia. We review our work on stress analysis of the 2016 Aceh earthquake and present a compilation of quantitative earthquake interaction studies from a stress change perspective. The 2016 earthquakes were deadly, caused more than 100 causalities, and unpredicted, in a sense that the driving force and the source mechanism remain unclear. No information was present on the extent of the faulting or the direction of propagation of the event. Therefore, it requires a stress transfer modeling in order to understand the possible seismic hazard distribution. The results of this study provide some clues about certain aspects of earthquake mechanics. It also demonstrates that we still have a lot of work ahead of us before we can understand the complete mechanism of how an earthquake occurs.