Abstract—A review is presented of the state-of-the-art publications concerning the nucleation and evolution of fault slip in the Earth’s crust. The review covers various aspects of the problem, from the structure of the slip localization zones to the triggering of dynamic rupture by exogenous factors. The publications show a clear current trend from investigating individual effects to studying interactions between subsets of the relevant processes on several spatial and time scales to establish probable correlations between different phenomena. The efforts of many research teams in the field of earthquake source physics and faulting are focused towards creating a computational model that relies on physical principles and successfully fulfils forecasting tasks. The review demonstrates multi-aspect and multi-scale character of the discussed problem and provides coverage of recent results and challenges in achieving the objectives. Some promising lines of development in geomechanics of faults, as they are seen from the author’s standpoint, are formulated.

摘要— 对有关地壳断层滑移成核和演化的最新出版物进行了综述。该综述涵盖了问题的各个方面，从滑动定位区的结构到外源因素对动态破裂的触发。这些出版物显示了从研究个体效应到研究几个空间和时间尺度上相关过程子集之间的相互作用以建立不同现象之间可能的相关性的明确当前趋势。许多震源物理和断层分析领域的研究团队的努力都集中在建立一个依赖物理原理并成功完成预测任务的计算模型上。审查展示了所讨论问题的多方面和多尺度特征，并涵盖了实现目标的最新成果和挑战。从作者的角度来看，断层地质力学的一些有希望的发展线被制定出来。