Nucleation of laboratory earthquakes: quantitative analysis and scalings

Abstract

Decades of seismological observations have highlighted the variability of foreshock occurrence prior to natural earthquakes, making thus difficult to track how earthquakes start. Here, we report on three stick-slip experiments performed on cylindrical samples of Indian metagabbro under upper crustal stress conditions (30-60 $MPa$). Acoustic emissions (AEs) were continuously recorded by 8 calibrated acoustic sensors during the experiments. Seismological parameters (moment magnitude, corner frequency and stress-drop) of the detected AEs ($-8.8 \leq Mw \leq -7 $) follow the scaling law between moment magnitude and corner frequency that characterizes natural earthquakes. AE activity always increases towards failure and is found to be driven by along fault slip velocity. Consistently for all three experiments, the stacked AE foreshock sequences follow an inverse power-law of the time to failure (inverse Omori), with a characteristic Omori time $c$ inversely proportional to normal stress. AEs moment magnitudes increase towards failure, as manifested by a decrease in b-value from $\sim 1$ to $\sim 0.5$ at the end of the nucleation process. During nucleation, the averaged distance of foreshocks to mainshock also continuously decreases, highlighting the fast migration of foreshocks towards the mainshock epicenter location, and stabilizing at a distance from the latter compatible with the predicted Rate-and-State nucleation size. Importantly, we also show that the nucleation characteristic timescale scales inversely with applied normal stress and the expected nucleation size. Finally, the seismic component of the nucleation phase is orders of magnitude smaller than that of its aseismic component, which suggests that, in this experimental setting at least, foreshocks are the byproducts of a process almost fully aseismic.