  Studying the effect of mechanical perturbations on granular systems is
crucial for understanding soil stability, avalanches, and earthquakes. We
investigate a granular system as a laboratory proxy for fault gouge. When
subjected to a slow shear, granular materials typically exhibit a stress
overshoot before reaching a steady state. We find that short seismic pulses can
reset a granular system flowing in steady state so that the stress overshoot is
regenerated. This new feature is shown to determine the stability of the
granular system under different applied stresses in the wake of a perturbation
pulse and the resulting dynamics when it fails. Using an analytical
aging-rejuvenation model for describing the overshoot response, we show that
our laboratory-derived theoretical framework, can quantitatively explain data
from two fault slip events triggered by seismic waves.
