What do seismic clusters tell us about fault stability?

Seismic activity clusters in space and time due to stress accumulation and static and dynamic triggering. Therefore, both moderate and large magnitude events can be preceded by smaller events and also seismic swarms can occur without being succeeded by major shocks – which represents the vast majority of cases.

Unveiling if seismic activity can forewarn mainshocks, being somewhat distinguished by swarms, is an issue of crucial importance for the development of short-term seismic hazard. The analysis of thousand clusters of seismicity before mainshocks in Southern California and Italy highlights that the surface over which selected seismic activity spreads is positively correlated with the magnitude of the impending mainshock, as well as the cumulative seismic moment, the number of earthquakes, the variance of magnitude and its entropy, while no significant difference is observed in the duration, seismic rate, and trends of magnitudes and interevent times between foreshocks and swarms. Our interpretation is that crustal volumes and fault interfaces host more and more correlated seismicity as they become unstable, and some properties of seismic clusters may mark their state of stability. For this reason, large mainshocks tend to occur in more extended correlated regions and because of the scaling of maximum magnitudes with the size of unstable faults. Considering this, the recording of more numerous and energetic cluster activity before mainshocks than during swarms is also reasonable.

In recent years, our ability to track seismic clusters has improved outstandingly, so that their structural and statistical characterization can be performed almost in real time. Therefore, it may be possible to compare the current features of the active seismic cluster with the cumulative distribution functions of past seismicity. However, we would like to stress that foreshocks should not be considered as precursors in the sense that neither they forewarn mainshocks, nor they are physically different from swarms: the precursor is not in seismic activity itself, but in the development of mechanical instability within crustal volumes.