Surface displacement and strain data from laboratory subduction megathrust earthquake cycles

This data set is digital image correlation data, including surface displacement and strain data from laboratory subduction megathrust earthquake cycles. The data consists of grids of surface strain (elastic and permanent), trench-normal surface displacement, vorticity and divergence maps over analog seismic cycles, and time series of surface displacement. The data have been derived using a stereo camera setup and processed with LaVision Davis 10 software. Detailed descriptions of the experiments and results regarding the surface pattern of the strain can be found in Kosari et al. (2023), to which this data set is supplementary. We use three configurations to mimic the along-strike heterogeneous spatiotemporal distribution of frictional locking (Rosenau et al., 2019; Kosari et al., 2022b). A central patch separates two stick-slip zones as an aseismic barrier in all configurations. The frictional properties of the central patch vary as a velocity-strengthening (VS configuration), a velocity-neutral (VN), and a velocity-weakening (VW configuration). The VW zone generates smaller slip events with a higher frequency (i.e., recurrence interval) than the stick-slip zones. Four frictionally different materials have been emplaced on the interface: The sticky-rice as velocity-weakening material (a-b<0) resulting in stick-slip cycles simulating earthquake cycles, fine-grained sugar and rubber-sand mixture as velocity-strengthening (a-b>0) and velocity-neutral (a-b=0) material, and fine-grained salt as velocity-weakening material (a-b<0) (Kosari et al., 2023).