“…Many of the mechanisms are activated by frictional heating during 1 rapid slip characteristic of seismic events, including thermal pressurization of pore fluids (TP), flash heating of the microscopic contacting asperities, and frictional melting [e.g., Rice, 2006, and references therein]. The temperature rise in the vicinity of a fault has been studied based on geological observations, including the existence of pseudotachylytes [e.g., Sibson, 1975], the change in the ESR signal [Fukuchi et al, 2005], the decomposition and reaction of rock-forming minerals [e.g., Hirono et al, 2008;Hamada et al, 2009aHamada et al, , 2009b, and the recovery of fission tracks [d'Alessio et al, 2003]. It is critically important to incorporate frictional heating and the resulting weakening processes into models of earthquake sequences so that the seismological observations as well as outcomes from field and experimental geology can be properly interpreted.…”