Pure appl. geophys. 157 (2000) 1945 – 1957 0033–4553/00/121945–13 $ 1.50 +0.20/0 Evolution-induced Catastrophe and its Predictability YU-JIE WEI, 1 MENG-FEN XIA, 1,2 FU-JIU KE, 1,3 XIANG-CHU YIN 1,4 and YI-LONG BAI 1 Abstract — Both earthquake prediction and failure prediction of disordered brittle media are difficult and complicated problems and they might have something in common. In order to search for clues for earthquake prediction, the common features of failure in a simple nonlinear dynamical model resembling disordered brittle media are examined. It is found that the failure manifests evolution- induced catastrophe (EIC), i.e., the abrupt transition from globally stable (GS) accumulation of damage to catastrophic failure. A distinct feature is the significant uncertainty of catastrophe, called sample-spe- cificity. Consequently, it is impossible to make a deterministic prediction macroscopically. This is similar to the question of predictability of earthquakes. However, our model shows that strong stress fluctuations may be an immediate precursor of catastrophic failure statistically. This might provide clues for earthquake forecasting. Key words: Evolution-induced catastrophe, sample-specificity, stress fluctuations, earthquake pre- diction, predictability. 1. Introduction Earthquake prediction, the contemporary scientific challenge, is drawing more and more attention. This is mainly due to two factors: the importance of earth- quake prediction and the difficulty of the problem. Currently, it seems that efforts to identify deterministic precursors of earth- quakes have been mostly unsuccessful. This arouses the discussion of whether an earthquake is predictable or not (GELLER et al., 1997). We still believe that earthquakes do have some incubating phase, although it seems still to be quite far beyond our knowledge. With many intriguing but fragmentary observations of possible precursory phenomena, people are frustrated again and again. Therefore, 1 State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China. E-mail: weiyj@lnm.imech.ac.cn; E-mail: baiyl@lnm.imech.ac.cn 2 Department of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. E-mail: xiam@lnm.imech.ac.cn 3 Department of Applied Physics, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing 100083, China. E-mail: kefi@lnm.imech.ac.cn 4 Center for Analysis and Prediction, China Seismological Bureau, Beijing 100036, China. E-mail: yinxc@btamail.net.cn