Precursory moment release scales with earthquake magnitude

Abstract

Today, observations of earthquake precursors remain widely debated. While precursory slow slip is an important feature of earthquake nucleation, foreshock sequences are not always observed and their temporal evolution remains unconstrained. Here, we report on stick-slip experiments (laboratory earthquakes) conducted under seismogenic stresses in dry and fluid pressure conditions. We show that the precursory moment release scales with mainshock magnitude irrespective of the slip behavior (seismic or aseismic), the presence of fluid and the fault's slip history. Importantly, this observation is supported by earthquake nucleation theory and holds for natural earthquakes in a magnitude range from M_w 6.0 to M_w 9.0. Even though a large gap remains between laboratory and natural observations, moderate to large earthquakes may be foresighted through integrated seismological and geodetic measurements of both seismic and aseismic slip during earthquake nucleation.