Fault lubrication during earthquakes
By G. Toro, R. Han, T. Hirose, N. Paola, S. Nielsen, Kazuo Mizoguchi, F. Ferri, Massimo Cocco, T. Shimamoto. Nature, 2011
877 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The determination of rock friction at seismic slip rates (about 1 m s−1) is of paramount importance in earthquake mechanics, as fault friction controls the stress drop, the mechanical work and the frictional heat generated during slip. Given the difficulty in determining friction by seismological methods, elucidating constraints are derived from experimental studies. Here we review a large set of published and unpublished experiments (∼300) performed in rotary shear apparatus at slip rates of 0.1–2.6 m s−1. The experiments indicate a significant decrease in friction (of up to one order of magnitude), which we term fault lubrication, both for cohesive (silicate-built, quartz-built and carbonate-built) rocks and non-cohesive rocks (clay-rich, anhydrite, gypsum and dolomite gouges) typical of crustal seismogenic sources. The available mechanical work and the associated temperature rise in the slipping zone trigger a number of physicochemical processes (gelification, decarbonation and dehydration reactions, melting and so on) whose products are responsible for fault lubrication. The similarity between (1) experimental and natural fault products and (2) mechanical work measures resulting from these laboratory experiments and seismological estimates suggests that it is reasonable to extrapolate experimental data to conditions typical of earthquake nucleation depths (7–15 km). It seems that faults are lubricated during earthquakes, irrespective of the fault rock composition and of the specific weakening mechanism involved.
Subfields: Geophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/50cd35218bc082d6be104cc172d948dd721d0cfd
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In Geophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Modeling and simulation in tribology across scales: An overview (2018, neutral): “Such reactions tend to self-lubricate the interface, with low friction resistance at the highest slipping rates [465].”
- Characterization of nucleation during laboratory earthquakes (2013, methodology): “…velocity Vr0 with initial stress 0 may then be understood when estimating the surfacic power p available at the rupture tip at each instant by using [Di Toro et al., 2011] p = 0 Pumax = k 0Vr (4) [11] In Figure 2b, we plot p as a function of the dimensionless rupture length L/L0 in log scale.”
- From Geodetic Imaging of Seismic and Aseismic Fault Slip to Dynamic Modeling of the Seismic Cycle (2015, background): “Laboratory observations at seismic sliding rates (e.g., Di Toro et al. 2011) additionally suggest a stronger weakening mechanism during seismic sliding than predicted by the aging rate-and-state friction law outlined above.”