Geophysics Seminar - Allan Rubin, "Merging elastic/frictional and stochastic models of slow slip"

About

Slow slip and nonvolcanic tremor were discovered over 20 years ago, but we still don’t understand how they are generated, or what distinguishes fault zones that produce slow slip from those that produce “regular” earthquakes. Models of slow slip tend to come in 2 flavors:

Continuum elastic/frictional models, designed to reproduce their slow propagation speeds and faster “tremor reversals”, and stochastic Brownian walk models, which lack basic physics but which reproduce various statistical properties of slow slip, including a ∼constant ratio of radiated seismic energy rate to moment rate. We have been exploring a stochastic elastic/frictional model that simultaneously reproduces many of the statistical properties of the stochastic models and the migration properties of continuum models. I’ll end by describing robust observations of tremor and slow slip that our model fails to reproduce, and what this might tell us about processes acting in the slow slip source region.

Speaker-suggested reading: Only up through section 3 of the following article: Xia, L., & Rubin, A. M. (2026). A simple discrete elastic model exhibits both the statistical properties and migration patterns of slow slip. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131, e2026JB034106. (link below)