Reproducing magnitude-invariant stress drops in fault models with thermal pressurization

Abstract eng:
We use fully dynamic simulations of long-term earthquake sequences on rate-and-state governed faults to investigate the observed trend of magnitude-invariant stress drops in natural earthquakes as well as increasing breakdown energy with increasing event size. We add in thermal pressurization as a dynamic weakening mechanism that allows events to continue to weaken as they generate slip. We find that this mechanism is able to explain the magnitude-invariance of stress drops by allowing large events to nucleate at lower average levels of prestress and then weaken further to lower final stresses, thus keeping the stress drops roughly constant through a range of event sizes.

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