资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

The energy released during earthquake rupture is partly radiated as seismic waves and mostly dissipated by frictional heating on the fault interface and by off-fault fracturing of surrounding host rock. Quantification of these individual components is crucial to understand the physics of rupture. We use a quasi-static rock fracture experiment combined with a novel seismic tomography method to quantify the contribution of off-fault fracturing to the energy budget of a rupture and find that this contribution is around 3% of the total energy budget and 10% of the fracture energy G(c). The off-fault dissipated energy changes the physical properties of the rock at the early stages of rupture, illustrated by the 50% drop in elastic moduli of the rock near the fault, and thus is expected to greatly influence later stages of rupture and slip. These constraints are a unique benchmark for calibration of dynamic rupture models.