From Local Events to Collective Failure: The Physics of Spatiotemporal Self-Organization Across Scales

Complex physical systems often evolve through the occurrence and interaction of numerous localized events. Although these events may initially appear heterogeneous, intermittent, and weakly correlated, their interactions can progressively generate spatial and temporal organization, leading to collective dynamics and abrupt system-scale transitions. Examples span a broad range of physical systems, including earthquake nucleation and fault rupture, microcracking and fracture in engineered materials and structures, granular rearrangements and avalanches, landslides, as well as mining-induced seismicity and rockbursts. Recent advances in laboratory experiments, distributed sensing, physics-based numerical modeling, and data-driven methods provide unprecedented opportunities to resolve these processes across scales. Yet a fundamental physics question remains largely open: how do local, heterogeneous events self-organize through space and time into coherent collective behavior and ultimately produce system-scale failure? For example, how do intermittent asperity slips evolve into a large stick-slip event, or how do initially isolated microcracks interact and coalesce into macroscopic fracture? Addressing this question requires connecting microscopic interactions and fluctuations with emergent macroscopic dynamics within a unified multiscale framework.This Research Topic aims to advance the physical understanding of how localized events interact, self-organize, and collectively evolve toward large-scale failure. The central question is what physical mechanisms control the transition from heterogeneous and apparently disordered local dynamics to correlated, synchronized, and system-scale collective behavior? We particularly seek contributions addressing three interconnected questions: (1) What controls the amplification or arrest of local instabilities? How do heterogeneity, interaction strength, stress and energy redistribution, and feedback determine whether local events remain isolated or trigger cascading processes? (2) How does collective behavior emerge across space and time? How do event clustering, synchronization, damage localization, and evolving correlations contribute to the nucleation of large events and the development of characteristic spatial and temporal scales? (3) Can the transition toward catastrophic failure be identified before it occurs? Can changes in event-size distributions, spatiotemporal correlations, network connectivity, or information-theoretic measures distinguish evolving instability from ordinary fluctuations?The Topic also aims to connect theoretical and experimental physics with emerging computational approaches. Laboratory and field observations, controlled experiments, analytical and statistical physics, numerical simulations, complex-network approaches, information theory, machine learning, and physics-informed artificial intelligence can provide complementary perspectives on these questions. By bringing these approaches together, we seek to identify general physical principles governing collective dynamics and failure across scales and across different physical systems.We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from physics, geoscience, geology, geophysics, seismology, mining engineering, rock mechanics, geotechnical engineering, materials science, experimental mechanics, computational science, complex systems, and artificial intelligence, particularly studies with clear connections to the underlying physics of collective dynamics and failure.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Spatiotemporal evolution, interaction, and self-organization of local events • Frictional sliding, asperity interactions, stick-slip, earthquake nucleation, and rupture • Microcracking, damage localization, fracture coalescence, and fragmentation • Mining-induced seismicity, rockbursts, landslides, and excavation-induced instability• Avalanches, depinning, synchronization, cascading failure, critical phenomena, and nonequilibrium dynamics • Multiscale correlations, collective modes, network evolution, information and entropy measures • Experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches to emergent failure • Machine learning, graph neural networks, physics-informed AI, and data-driven discovery of collective dynamics Topic editors: Weiwei Shu, Dayou Luo, Daoyuan Sun Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86601/from-local-events-to-collective-failure-the-physics-of-spatiotemporal-self-organization-across-scales