Immediate-foreshocks indicating a common cascading earthquake rupture
development
Abstract
Understanding the seismic precursors is essential for deciphering
earthquake rupture physics and can aid earthquake probabilistic
forecasting. With regional dense seismic arrays, we identify seismic
precursors of 527 0.9 ≤ M ≤ 5.4 events of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake
sequence, including 48 earthquakes with series of precursors. These
precursors are likely immediate-foreshocks that are adjacent to the
earthquakes. Their corresponding precursory signals share high
resemblances with the earthquake P-waves and occur within 100 s of the
P-waves. However, attributes of the immediate-foreshocks, including the
amplitudes and preceding times, do not clearly scale with the eventual
earthquake magnitudes. Our observations suggest that earthquake rupture
may initiate in a universal fashion but evolves stochastically. This
indicates that earthquake rupture development is likely controlled by
fine-scale fault heterogeneities in the Ridgecrest fault system, and the
final magnitude is the only difference between small and large
earthquakes.