1. Seasonal slow slip in landslides as a window into the frictional rheology of creeping shear zones.
- Author
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Finnegan, Noah J. and Saffer, Demian M.
- Subjects
- *
LANDSLIDE prediction , *PORE water pressure , *CREEP (Materials) , *SHEAR zones , *RHEOLOGY , *LANDSLIDES - Abstract
Whether Earth materials exhibit frictional creep or catastrophic failure is a crucial but unresolved problem in predicting landslide and earthquake hazards. Here, we show that field-scale observations of sliding velocity and pore water pressure at two creeping landslides are explained by velocity-strengthening friction, in close agreement with laboratory measurements on similar materials. This suggests that the rate-strengthening friction commonly measured in clay-rich materials may govern episodic slow slip in landslides, in addition to tectonic faults. Further, our results show more generally that transient slow slip can arise in velocity-strengthening materials from modulation of effective normal stress through pore pressure fluctuations. This challenges the idea that episodic slow slip requires a narrow range of transitional frictional properties near the stability threshold, or pore pressure feedbacks operating on initially unstable frictional slip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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