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G: Fracture energy, friction and dissipation in earthquakes

Nielsen, S.; Spagnuolo, E.; Violay, M.; Smith, S.; Toro, G.; Bistacchi, A.

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Authors

E. Spagnuolo

M. Violay

S. Smith

G. Toro

A. Bistacchi



Abstract

Recent estimates of fracture energy G ′ in earthquakes show a power-law dependence with slip u which can be summarized as G ′ ∝ u a where a is a positive real slightly larger than one. For cracks with sliding friction, fracture energy can be equated to G f : the post-failure integral of the dynamic weakening curve. If the dominant dissipative process in earthquakes is friction, G ′ and G f should be comparable and show a similar scaling with slip. We test this hypothesis by analyzing experiments performed on various cohesive and non-cohesive rock types, under wet and dry conditions, with imposed deformation typical of seismic slip (normal stress of tens of MPa, target slip velocity > 1 m/s and fast accelerations ≈ 6.5 m/s2). The resulting fracture energy G f is similar to the seismological estimates, with G f and G ′ being comparable over most of the slip range. However, G f appears to saturate after several meters of slip, while in most of the reported earthquake sequences, G ′ appears to increase further and surpasses G f at large magnitudes. We analyze several possible causes of such discrepancy, in particular, additional off-fault damage in large natural earthquakes.

Citation

Nielsen, S., Spagnuolo, E., Violay, M., Smith, S., Toro, G., & Bistacchi, A. (2016). G: Fracture energy, friction and dissipation in earthquakes. Journal of Seismology, 20(4), 1187-1205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-016-9560-1

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 15, 2016
Online Publication Date Mar 31, 2016
Publication Date Oct 1, 2016
Deposit Date May 4, 2016
Publicly Available Date May 5, 2016
Journal Journal of Seismology
Print ISSN 1383-4649
Electronic ISSN 1573-157X
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 4
Pages 1187-1205
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-016-9560-1

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version Open Access © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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