Foreshocks explained by cascades of triggered seismicity

By Agnes Helmstetter, Didier Sornette. 2002

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

[1] The observation of foreshocks preceding large earthquakes and the suggestion that foreshocks have specific properties that may be used to distinguish them from other earthquakes have raised the hope that large earthquakes may be predictable. Among proposed anomalous properties are the larger proportion than normal of large versus small foreshocks, the power law acceleration of seismicity rate as a function of time to the mainshock, and the spatial migration of foreshocks toward the mainshock when averaging over many sequences. Using southern California seismicity, we show that these properties and others arise naturally from the simple model that any earthquake may trigger other earthquakes, without arbitrary distinction between foreshocks, aftershocks, and mainshocks. We find that foreshock precursory properties are independent of the mainshock size. This implies that earthquakes (large or small) are predictable to the same degree as seismicity rate is predictable from past seismicity by taking into account cascades of triggering. The cascades of triggering give rise naturally to long-range and long-time interactions, which can explain the observations of correlations in seismicity over surprisingly large length scales.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/026fa7bdb55616c1ca0e9d05dede00c8dd43a5a4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. M. Ishii
2. Zhigang Peng
3. J. Vidale
4. Agnes Helmstetter
5. G. Ekström

In Geophysics

1. Zhigang Peng
2. M. Ishii
3. J. Vidale
4. G. Ekström
5. K. Felzer
6. R. Abercrombie
7. Agnes Helmstetter
8. Paul Segall

Citations in the corpus

• Precursory Slow Slip and Foreshocks on Rough Faults (2020, background): “On the other hand, foreshocks have been interpreted as a cascade of events triggered by one another, not mediated by an aseis-64 mic process (Helmstetter & Sornette, 2003; Hardebeck et al., 2008; Schurr et al., 2014).”
• Prediction (2010, unknown): “The cascades of secondary triggering provides a mechanism for slow aftershock sub-diffusion [50, 49] and s low foreshock migration [56, 52].”
• Seismicity rate immediately before and after main shock rupture from high-frequency waveforms in Japan (2007, methodology): “Recent studies have shown that the increased rate of foreshocks can be described by an inverse power law with the same functional form as the modified Omori's law for aftershocks, but the values of the parameters are different [Jones and Molnar, 1979; Maeda, 1999; Helmstetter and Sornette, 2003].”
• A Common Origin for Aftershocks, Foreshocks, and Multiplets (2002, background): “Previous studies have shown that there is no correlation between mainshock magnitude and the magnitude of the largest foreshock (Agnew and Jones, 1991; Abercrombie and Mori, 1996; Reasenberg, 1999; Helmstetter and Sornette, 2003).”
• Introduction to special section: Stress transfer, earthquake triggering, and time‐dependent seismic hazard (2005, unknown): “, 2003; Ogata, 2005], to investigate the relative role of fluids and stress transfer in earthquake swarms [Hainzl and Ogata, 2005] and to support the idea that earthquake triggering occurs at all scales and hence there is no mechanistic differences between foreshocks, main shocks, and aftershocks [H”