In Chapter 18 of the book, we discuss the behavior around critical points in the context of reliability, both at the small-scale in terms of component breakdown, and in the large-scale in the context of earthquake triggering which was introduced in Chapter 13. The connection is that things break at all scales, with the common mechanism of a varying rate of progression to the critical point:

As indicated in the figure caption, the failure rate is generally probabilistic but with known external forcings, there is the potential for a better deterministic prediction of the breakdown point, which is reviewed below:

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