An experimental study of triggered stick-slip

Abstract

Stick-slips have been studied in the laboratory on granite, labrodorite and sandstone samples of two different sizes. Different roughness was achieved on the sawcut surfaces by finishing them with different grinding compounds ranging from grit 40 to grit 1000. Stick-slips occurred as a result of 1) slowly increasing the shear and normal stresses, 2) superimposing a sinusoidal stress modulation (0.1 and 10 Hz) on the slowly increasing stresses, 3) triggering by a stress impulse when the shear stress was well below the levels where stick-slips occurred without the impulse, and 4) foreshocks.

Stick-slips triggered by impulses or foreshocks occurred “long” after the beginning of the triggering events, i.e., long in comparison with elastic wave travel times through the sample. All triggered events were very rich in high frequencies (corner frequency of ∼100 kHz). The untriggered stick-slips did not contain much energy at the high frequencies (corner frequency of ∼10 kHz). The dynamic friction coefficients for the triggered stick-slips were smaller than for the untriggered events.

The “long” delay between the onset of the trigger and the stick-slip, and the high frequencies may be a consequence of corrosion of asperities. The ultimate triggering and the rate of corrosion are likely related to the interplay of the normal and shear stresses as they load and unload the fault surface. The consistent shape of the high frequency spectra is probably due to sample resonances which are excited rather than being characteristic of the details of the stick-slips. If these laboratory observations are directly applicable to earthquake seismology, the spectra of earthquakes which were triggered by other earthquakes should be anomalously rich in high frequencies.