Stability of Pulse‐Like Earthquake Ruptures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Pulse‐like ruptures arise spontaneously in many elastodynamic rupture simulations and seem to be the dominant rupture mode along crustal faults. Pulse‐like ruptures propagating under steady state conditions can be efficiently analyzed theoretically, but it remains unclear how they can arise and how they evolve if perturbed. Using thermal pressurization as a representative constitutive law, we conduct elastodynamic simulations of pulse‐like ruptures and determine the spatiotemporal evolution of slip, slip rate, and pulse width perturbations induced by infinitesimal perturbations in background stress. These simulations indicate that steady state pulses driven by thermal pressurization are unstable. If the initial stress perturbation is negative, ruptures stop; conversely, if the perturbation is positive, ruptures grow and transition to either self‐similar pulses (at low background stress) or expanding cracks (at elevated background stress). Based on a dynamic dislocation model, we develop an elastodynamic equation of motion for slip pulses and demonstrate that steady state slip pulses are unstable if their accrued slip b is a decreasing function of the uniform background stress τ b . This condition is satisfied by slip pulses driven by thermal pressurization. The equation of motion also predicts quantitatively the growth rate of perturbations and provides a generic tool to analyze the propagation of slip pulses. The unstable character of steady state slip pulses implies that this rupture mode is a key one determining the minimum stress conditions for sustainable ruptures along faults, that is, their “strength.” Furthermore, slip pulse instabilities can produce a remarkable complexity of rupture dynamics, even under uniform background stress conditions and material properties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".