Unstable physical processes operating on self-governing fault systems, Improved Modeling Methodology

Abstract

The field of earthquake seismology has made incredible progress over the past century towards understanding the processes that give rise to earthquakes. At the same time, many aspects of this phenomenon remain debated or unclear, and the prospect of being able to make actionable short-term predictions of earthquakes seems as far away as it has ever been. Key factors that inhibit the progress of earthquake science are the sparsity of data in both space and time of the complex subsurface, but also the tradeoffs and pragmatic choices that have to be made when simulating earthquake processes both in the laboratory and in numerical models. The contributions collected in this dissertation build upon a growing research direction in numerical and physical model development wherein a fracture zone in the Earth’s crust is treated as a diffuse interface that has the potential to grow and evolve over geological time scales. Because it avoids some barriers that other methods face, and suffers from yet others, this approach may prove to be a valuable addition to the tools of earthquake seismology.