Abstract
SUMMARY We develop a theory of seismic fracture utilizing the concepts of shear melting and the wetting transition. The basic mechanism involves the wetting of a pre-existing planar defect by a melted phase of microscopic width, eliminating friction forces on thin, almost planar regions. For fault regions of finite thickness this mechanism results in an order-of-magnitude increase in the creep rate, sufficient to initiate a macroscopic melt in the fault region. This model can explain observations of low-stress drops and small heat-flow anomalies in the neighbourhood of superficial faults, the cutoff in seismicity with depth in the San Andreas system, and the non-linear deformations observed near the fault trace.
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