Meng Wei received a B.S. degree in Geophysics from Peking University, China. He got his Ph.D. degree in Earth Science from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is currently a postdoctoral investigator at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography. He studies fault mechanics and earthquake cycles using geodetic observations and numerical modeling.

A large fraction of the plate tectonic displacement is released by aseismic slip. New observations show complex interactions between earthquakes, tremors and aseismic slip events. Therefore, the study of aseismic slip has important implications for fault mechanics and regional seismic hazard assessment. Here I present two case studies of aseismic slip transients using both observations and modeling. One study is on the Superstition Hills Fault, a strike-slip fault near the southern end of the San Andreas Fault in California. The other is on south central Alaska subduction zone, near the rupture zone of the 1964 Mw 9.2 megathrust earthquake. I will discuss the implications of these two geodetic studies. Furthermore, in aiming to understand how nearby earthquakes trigger aseismic slip transients on a strike slip fault, we did quasi-dynamic modeling of the earthquake cycle in the framework of rate and state friction. We use realistic static and dynamic shaking due to nearby earthquakes as stress perturbations in the models. Results show that both static and dynamic triggering can advance and delay future slip transients. With these new observations and modeling, we advance one more step towards understanding fault mechanics.