Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
Earthquakes release energy and result in source properties defined across a wide range of scales that are not represented in conventional frictional laws. Norisugi and Noda [2026] introduce a new rate- and roughness-dependent friction (RRF) law which incorporates both effects from fault slip rate and multi-scale variation in fault topography. By limiting the number of state variables in the RRF formulation, the authors show with efficient earthquake cycle simulation that this multi-scale approach can reproduce a key observed relationship between fracture energy and fault slip.
Although further refinement is needed to better represent roughness evolution, this study marks a major advance in earthquake modeling by demonstrating the necessity and feasibility of incorporating multi-scale fault topography in the characterization of earthquake source process. Â
Citation: Norisugi, R., & Noda, H. (2026). Multi-scale rate- and roughness-dependent frictional constitutive law and dynamic earthquake sequence simulation. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131, e2025JB033580. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB033580
—Yajing Liu, Associate Editor, JGR: Solid Earth
Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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