The two largest earthquakes of the past 40 years ruptured a 1600-kilometer-long portion of the fault boundary between the Indo-Australian and southeastern Eurasian plates on 26 December 2004 [seismic moment magnitude (Mw) = 9.1 to 9.3] and 28 March 2005 (Mw = 8.6). The first event generated a tsunami that caused more than 283,000 deaths. Fault slip of up to 15 meters occurred near Banda Aceh, S...

The near-surface areas of major faults commonly contain weak, phyllosilicate minerals, which, based on laboratory friction measurements, are assumed to creep stably. However, it is now known that shallow faults can experience tens of meters of earthquake slip and also host slow and transient slip events. Laboratory experiments are generally performed at least two orders of magnitude faster than...

S U M M A R Y We determine the finite-fault slip distribution of the 2001 Kunlun earthquake (M s = 8.1) by inverting teleseismic waveforms, as constrained by geological and remote sensing field observations. The spatial slip distribution along the 400-km-long fault was divided into five segments in accordance with geological observations. Forward modelling of regional surface waves was performe...

[1] We argue that key features of thrust earthquake triggering, inhibition, and clustering can be explained by Coulomb stress changes, which we illustrate by a suite of representative models and by detailed examples. Whereas slip on surface-cutting thrust faults drops the stress in most of the adjacent crust, slip on blind thrust faults increases the stress on some nearby zones, particularly ab...

[1] We develop a spectral element method (SEM) for simulating dynamic rupture on rate and state faults and use it to study how the rupture is affected by a shallow fault region of steady state velocity-strengthening friction. Our comparison of the developed SEM and a spectral boundary integral method (BIM) for an antiplane (two-dimensional) test problem shows that for the finest resolution that...

Anthropogenic fluid injections are known to induce earthquakes. The mechanisms involved are poorly understood, and our ability to assess the seismic hazard associated with geothermal energy or unconventional hydrocarbon production remains limited. We directly measure fault slip and seismicity induced by fluid injection into a natural fault. We observe highly dilatant and slow [~4 micrometers pe...

[1] Using dynamic rupture models, we examine the response of compliant fault zones that surround pre‐existing faults to nearby earthquakes. We find that some portions of a compliant fault zone can experience inelastic deformation due to dynamic stress perturbations, while the remaining portions deform elastically. Inelastic response of the fault zone results in sympathetic fault‐parallel motion...

We simulate dynamic ruptures on a strike-slip fault in homogeneous and layered half-spaces and on a thrust fault in a layered half-space. With traditional friction models, sliding friction exceeds 50% of the fault normal compressive stress, and unless the pore pressures approach the lithostatic stress, the rupture characteristics depend strongly on the depth, and sliding generates large amounts...

We have inverted the teleseismic P waveforms recorded by stations of the Global Digital Seismograph Network for the 8 July 1986 North Palm Springs, California, the 28 October 1983 Borah Peak, Idaho, and the 19 September 1985 Michoacan, Mexico, earthquakes to recover the distribution of slip on each of the faults using a point-by-point inversion method with smoothing and posiUvity constraints. I...

We determined the centroid moment tensor (CMT) solutions of earthquakes that occurred along the North Anatolian fault (NAF) beneath the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea, using data obtained from Turkey’s broadband seismograph network. The CMT solution of the 2014 Aegean Sea earthquake (Mw 6.9) represents a strike-slip fault, consistent with the geometry of the NAF, and the source-time function...