Diffusional earthquakes and their slip-distance scaling

Abstract

The final size of an earthquake typically cannot be predicted from its ongoing seismic radiation. Expanding observations reveal distinct exceptions, such as slow earthquakes, injection-induced seismicity, and earthquake swarms, in which fault slip has an upper bound. A common thread among these anomalies is the diffusive migration of their active areas. Here, we report a unified scaling relation for these diffusional earthquakes. By tracking prolonged earthquake swarms in Northeast Japan, we constrained the time evolution of their active seismicity areas and cumulative seismic moments. Their moment-duration trajectories coincide with the final states documented for global swarms and induced seismicity across various scales. When plotted as seismic moment versus seismicity area, their trajectories collapse onto those of slow earthquakes, uniformly explained by a diffusional constant-slip model. This constant-slip scaling carves out a unique class of diffusional earthquakes, where the final available seismic energy is predetermined by slip distance.