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Published September 2010 | Published
Journal Article Open

A unified continuum representation of post-seismic relaxation mechanisms: semi-analytic models of afterslip, poroelastic rebound and viscoelastic flow

Abstract

We present a unified continuum mechanics representation of the mechanisms believed to be commonly involved in post-seismic transients such as viscoelasticity, fault creep and poroelasticity. The time-dependent relaxation that follows an earthquake, or any other static stress perturbation, is considered in a framework of a generalized viscoelastoplastic rheology whereby some inelastic strain relaxes a physical quantity in the material. The relaxed quantity is the deviatoric stress in case of viscoelastic relaxation, the shear stress in case of creep on a fault plane and the trace of the stress tensor in case of poroelastic rebound. In this framework, the instantaneous velocity field satisfies the linear inhomogeneous Navier's equation with sources parametrized as equivalent body forces and surface tractions. We evaluate the velocity field using the Fourier-domain Green's function for an elastic half-space with surface buoyancy boundary condition. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparisons with finite-element simulations of viscoelastic relaxation following strike-slip and dip-slip ruptures for linear and power-law rheologies. We also present comparisons with analytic solutions for afterslip driven by coseismic stress changes. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to model time-dependent poroelastic rebound by adopting a viscoelastic rheology with bulk viscosity and work hardening. The proposed method allows one to model post-seismic transients that involve multiple mechanisms (afterslip, poroelastic rebound, ductile flow) with an account for the effects of gravity, non-linear rheologies and arbitrary spatial variations in inelastic properties of rocks (e.g. the effective viscosity, rate-and-state frictional parameters and poroelastic properties).

Additional Information

© 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 RAS. Accepted 2010 May 26. Received 2010 May 17; in original form 2009 October 6. Article first published online: 5 July 2010. The paper benefited from the comments of the Editor Jean Virieux and the reviews of Michel Rabinowicz and an anonymous reviewer. We thank Robert C.Viesca for stimulating discussions about the theory of poroelasticity. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant EAR-0944336) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (the SCEC contribution used for this paper is 1336). The numerical codes used in this paper are available at http://www.its.caltech.edu/sbarbot/crust/ .

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