Development of Sliding Regimes in Faults and Slow Strain Waves

The paper investigates a model simulating crustal fault dynamics and strain wave generation in a fault block geological medium, the parameters determining sliding regimes in faults, and the physics of transitions between different deformation regimes. The model comprises the most important mechanisms responsible for the interaction of fault walls: friction, geometric irregularities (roughness and asperities on the fault surface), and external load, which govern sliding along the fault. The results of field and laboratory studies of deformation migration on the macro/mesoscale are consistent with the concept of localized deformation propagation in the form of solitary waves (kinks, solitons) and autowaves. The conditions are defined which make possible the transition from the model simulating solitary waves in a conservative medium with low “friction” (soliton-like behavior of the system) toward the model of solitary waves in an active medium with diffusion (autowave-like behavior of the system). Two possible deformation regimes of the fault block structure in the high-friction limit are considered. The fault wall displacement is stopped due to this friction, but the adjacent blocks move relative to each other in the core of the fault. It is shown that in the high-friction limit a perturbed sine-Gordon equation applied for fault dynamics modeling is reduced to a reaction-diffusion equation, whereas the system goes from the soliton regime to the autowave regime. In the case of high friction and a lack of energy supply to the fault from an external source, the transfer of localized deformation is changed by a diffusive dissipation of stress.