  The Burridge-Knopoff model of earthquakes has recently gained increased
interest for the consistency of the predicted energy released by sismic faults,
with the Gutenberg-Richter scaling law. The present work suggests an
improvement of this model to account for long-range dispersions and large
spatial diffusion of sismic faults. An enhancement of the threshold speed of
shock waves driven by translated fault fronts is pointed out and shown to
result from the interactions between components of the system situated far
aways them and others. Due to the enhanced threshold speed, size of the sismic
fault gets increased but a control effect can still be gained from tunable
dispersion extent irrespective of the total length of the system. To the
viewpoint of the Burridge-Knopoff block-lattice model, this last consideration
introduces the possibility of sizable but finite interactions among infinitely
aligned massive blocks. Implications on the fault wave propagation are examined
by numerical simulations of the improved nonlinear partial differential
equation.
