Eileen Evans Phoebe M. R. Devries 2016 <p><span>A central goal of observing and modeling the earthquake cycle is to forecast when a particular fault may generate an earthquake: a fault late in its earthquake cycle may be more likely to generate an earthquake than a fault early in its earthquake cycle. Models that can explain geodetic observations throughout the entire earthquake cycle may be required to gain a more complete understanding of relevant physics and phenomenology. Previous efforts to develop unified earthquake models for strike-slip faults have largely focused on explaining both preseismic and postseismic geodetic observations available across a few faults in California, Turkey, and Tibet. An alternative approach leverages the global distribution of geodetic and geologic slip rate estimates on strike-slip faults worldwide. Here we use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for similarity of distributions to infer, in a statistically rigorous manner, viscoelastic earthquake cycle models that are inconsistent with 15 sets of observations across major strike-slip faults. We reject a large subset of two-layer models incorporating Burgers rheologies at a significance level of </span><i>α</i><span> = 0.05 (those with long-term Maxwell viscosities </span><i>η</i>_M<span> &lt;~ 4.0 × 10</span>¹⁹<span> Pa s and </span><i>η</i>_M<span> &gt;~ 4.6 × 10</span>²⁰<span> Pa s) but cannot reject models on the basis of transient Kelvin viscosity </span><i>η</i>_K<span>. Finally, we examine the implications of these results for the predicted earthquake cycle timing of the 15 faults considered and compare these predictions to the geologic and historical record.</span></p> application/pdf 10.1002/2016GL070681 en American Geophysical Union Statistical tests of simple earthquake cycle models article