Acceleration spikes in strong earthquake ground motion induced by dilatancy cyclic mobility mechanism

Strong motion records with acceleration spikes have occurred frequently in recent major earthquakes, acceleration spikes contribute to the peak ground accelerations (PGAs) and the amplitudes are significantly higher than the predicted values based on present attenuation relation. The generation mechanism of acceleration spikes is revealed based on long-term monitoring after the 2008 Mw 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake. The horizontal accelerogram with obvious spikes from the Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake is reproduced by using numerical simulation, and it’s found that the dilatancy cyclic mobility (DCM) mechanism can explain the generation of acceleration spikes. The support vector machine (SVM) is used to efficiently identify DCM sites. We found that the spatial distribution of DCM sites is parallel to the earthquake source fault and the corresponding PGAs of ground motions recorded in DCM sites differ significantly from those recorded in non-dilatancy cyclic mobility (NDCM) sites.