Record statistics of bursts signals the onset of acceleration towards failure.

Forecasting the imminent catastrophic failure has a high importance for a large variety of systems from the collapse of engineering constructions, through the emergence of landslides and earthquakes, to volcanic eruptions. Failure forecast methods predict the lifetime of the system based on the time-to-failure power law of observables describing the final acceleration towards failure. We show that the statistics of records of the event series of breaking bursts, accompanying the failure process, provides a powerful tool to detect the onset of acceleration, as an early warning of the impending catastrophe. We focus on the fracture of heterogeneous materials using a fiber bundle model, which exhibits transitions between perfectly brittle, quasi-brittle, and ductile behaviors as the amount of disorder is increased. Analyzing the lifetime of record size bursts, we demonstrate that the acceleration starts at a characteristic record rank, below which record breaking slows down due to the dominance of disorder in fracturing, while above it stress redistribution gives rise to an enhanced triggering of bursts and acceleration of the dynamics. The emergence of this signal depends on the degree of disorder making both highly brittle fracture of low disorder materials, and ductile fracture of strongly disordered ones, unpredictable.