Generic mechanism for remote triggering of earthquakes.

``Remote triggering'' refers to the inducement of earthquakes by weak perturbations that emanate from faraway sources, typically intense earthquakes that happen at much larger distances than their nearby aftershocks, sometimes even around the globe. Here, we propose a mechanism for this phenomenon; the proposed mechanism is generic, resulting from the breaking of Hamiltonian symmetry due to the existence of friction. We allow a transition from...