Tertiary creep behavior for various rate- and state-dependent friction laws

Forecasting the acceleration of slow landslides to the point of catastrophic failure is crucial. It follows the Voight power-law model with the power exponent & alpha;, which is typically close to 2 but can be significantly smaller. Understanding the underlying mechanisms may improve landslide warnings. A previous study applied a rate-and state-dependent friction (RSF) law in the form of the aging law to the creep behavior of an underlying shear zone of landslides, and showed an & alpha; value of 2. The aging law is one of the conventional forms of RSF law, and we extended the analysis to other representative laws: the slip law, Perrin-Rice-Zheng (PRZ) law, composite law, and Nagata law. We showed that the acceleration is expressed in terms of the slip rate using the state-evolution equation. As the slip rate increases, & alpha; decays to 2, regardless of the frictional parameters, following a power law for the aging and Nagata laws and logarithmically for the slip and the composite laws. For the PRZ law, the asymptotic value of & alpha; is between 2 and 3 and depends on frictional parameters. In typical RSF laws, the logarithm of the slip rate is proportional to the friction coefficient or normalized shear stress f minus frictional strength O. The logarithmic direct effect and a linear increase with slip in f - O independent of the slip rate, which is a characteristic of aging and Nagata laws under constant stress conditions, leads to & alpha; = 2. By contrast, a purely time-dependent increase in f - O would lead to & alpha; = 1. If these two effects coexist, & alpha; increases from 1 to 2 with acceleration. In laboratory experiments of investigation of RSF law, constant-load creep tests in the tertiary-creep stage have been rarely conducted, but they could provide new insights on the form of the state-evolution equation and deserve future study. & COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).

Automated summary

Forecasting the acceleration of slow landslides to catastrophic failure is crucial for improving landslide warnings. A previous study used a rate-and-state-dependent friction law to analyze the creep behavior of landslides and found that the acceleration follows a power law with an exponent value of 2. Further analysis showed that the slip rate affects the exponent value differently depending on the type of friction law used.