Correlation between seismic activity and tidal stress perturbations highlights growing instability within the brittle crust

Davide Zaccagnino; Luciano Telesca; Carlo Doglioni

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-11328-z

Correlation between seismic activity and tidal stress perturbations highlights growing instability within the brittle crust

Sci Rep. 2022 May 2;12(1):7109. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-11328-z.

Authors

Davide Zaccagnino¹, Luciano Telesca², Carlo Doglioni^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Sapienza University, Earth Sciences Department, Rome, 00185, Italy. davide.zaccagnino@uniroma1.it.
² Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis, National Research Council (CNR-IMAA), Tito Scalo (PZ), 85050, Italy.
³ Sapienza University, Earth Sciences Department, Rome, 00185, Italy.
⁴ Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, 00143, Italy.

Abstract

Faults become more and more responsive to stress perturbations as instability mounts. We utilize this property in order to identify the different phases of the seismic cycle. Our analysis provides new insights about the features of impending mainshocks, which are proposed to emerge from a large-scale crustal-weakening preparation process whose duration depends on their seismic moments, according to the power-law T [Formula: see text] M[Formula: see text] for M[Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] 10[Formula: see text] N m. Moreover, further studies are performed about the impact of tidal stress perturbation on seismicity; in particular, the relationship between frequency-magnitude scaling and perturbations is discussed, showing that the sensitivity of earthquakes to solid Earth tides decreases as their magnitudes increase.