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Immediate-foreshocks indicating a common cascading earthquake rupture development
  • Haoran Meng,
  • Wenyuan Fan
Haoran Meng
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Wenyuan Fan
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD
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Abstract

Understanding the seismic precursors is essential for deciphering earthquake rupture physics and can aid earthquake probabilistic forecasting. With regional dense seismic arrays, we identify seismic precursors of 527 0.9 ≤ M ≤ 5.4 events of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence, including 48 earthquakes with series of precursors. These precursors are likely immediate-foreshocks that are adjacent to the earthquakes. Their corresponding precursory signals share high resemblances with the earthquake P-waves and occur within 100 s of the P-waves. However, attributes of the immediate-foreshocks, including the amplitudes and preceding times, do not clearly scale with the eventual earthquake magnitudes. Our observations suggest that earthquake rupture may initiate in a universal fashion but evolves stochastically. This indicates that earthquake rupture development is likely controlled by fine-scale fault heterogeneities in the Ridgecrest fault system, and the final magnitude is the only difference between small and large earthquakes.
16 Oct 2021Published in Geophysical Research Letters volume 48 issue 19. 10.1029/2021GL095704