Signatures of the self-affinity of fracture and faulting in pre-seismic electromagnetic emissions

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether electromagnetic emissions from fault activation exhibit precursors like fractal dimension drops and entropy changes, supporting the self-affine nature of faulting and potential earthquake prediction.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of electromagnetic emissions to identify precursory signs of fault failure based on self-affinity concepts, bridging theory and observational data.

Findings

Detection of fractal dimension and entropy drops before fault activation

Observation of rising Hurst exponent in pre-seismic electromagnetic signals

Identification of frequency-size scaling changes related to fault activity

Abstract

Of particular interest is the detection of precursors of an impending rupture. Theoretical, numerical studies along with laboratory experiments indicate that precursory signs of an impending failure are the sudden drop of fractal dimension and entropy, along with the anticorrelated, for large system sizes, rising of Hurst exponent and drop of a frequency-size power-law scaling exponent. Based on the widely accepted concept of the self-affine nature of faulting and fracture, we examine whether these precursory signs exist in the fracto-electromagnetic emissions resulting from the activation of a single fault.