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Generic Earthquake Simulator

Terry E. Tullis, Keith B. Richards-Dinger, Michael Barall, James H. Dieterich, Edward H. Field, Eric M. Heien, Louise H. Kellogg, Fred F. Pollitz, John B. Rundle, Michael K. Sachs, Donald L. Turcotte, Steven N. Ward, Mehmet B. Yikilmaz, & Olaf Zielke

Published 2012, SCEC Contribution #1599

Earthquake simulators are computer programs that generate a long history of simulated earthquakes, using the physics of stress transfer and frictional resistance on faults. There are a wide variety of approximations that need to be made in order to do this and a variety of earthquake simulators exist that deal with these approximations differently. However, these simulators share a number of features as well, and these shared features are described in this paper. They include the use of a set of faults with specified geometries, slip rates, and stress drops. The time-dependent stress on each fault element results from the sum of the stress due to back slip at the prescribed slip rate and stress transfer due to slip on all other elements. Some form of frictional resistance exists for all simulators, but the details of this differ among them.

Citation
Tullis, T. E., Richards-Dinger, K. B., Barall, M., Dieterich, J. H., Field, E. H., Heien, E. M., Kellogg, L. H., Pollitz, F. F., Rundle, J. B., Sachs, M. K., Turcotte, D. L., Ward, S. N., Yikilmaz, M. B., & Zielke, O. (2012). Generic Earthquake Simulator. Seismological Research Letters, 83(6), 959-963. doi: 10.1785/0220120093.