Systematic Assessment of the Static Stress-Triggering Hypothesis using Inter-earthquake Time Statistics

TL;DR

This study empirically tests the static stress triggering hypothesis for earthquakes, finding significant evidence supporting it and identifying a characteristic stress change memory time of approximately 95 to 180 days.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, uncertainty-aware empirical assessment of static stress triggering, including all events above magnitude 2.5 and analyzing focal mechanism ambiguities.

Findings

Strong evidence supports static stress triggering above ~10 Pa.

The role of normal stress in triggering is limited.

Stress change memory lasts approximately 95 to 180 days.

Abstract

A likely source of earthquake clustering is static stress transfer between individual events. Previous attempts to quantify the role of static stress for earthquake triggering generally considered only the stress changes caused by large events, and often discarded data uncertainties. We conducted a robust two-fold empirical test of the static stress change hypothesis by accounting for all events of magnitude M>=2.5 and their location and focal mechanism uncertainties provided by catalogs for Southern California between 1981 and 2010, first after resolving the focal plane ambiguity and second after randomly choosing one of the two nodal planes. For both cases, we find compelling evidence supporting the static triggering with stronger evidence after resolving the focal plane ambiguity above significantly small (about 10 Pa) but consistently observed stress thresholds. The evidence for the static triggering hypothesis is robust with respect to the choice of the friction coefficient, Skempton's coefficient and magnitude threshold. Weak correlations between the Coulomb Index (fraction of earthquakes that received positive Coulomb stress change) and the coefficient of friction indicate that the role of normal stress in triggering is rather limited. Last but not the least, we determined that the characteristic time for the loss of the stress change memory of a single event is nearly independent of the amplitude of the Coulomb stress change and varies between ~95 and ~180 days implying that forecasts based on static stress changes will have poor predictive skills beyond times that are larger than a few hundred days on average.