Starting point: Can engineering provide a new explanation for why earthquakes occur?

Providence, RI [Brown University] By taking a closer look at the geometric composition of the rocks from which earthquakes originate, researchers at Brown University are adding a new wrinkle to the long-held belief about what causes earthquakes in the first place.

This work, described in the journal Nature, reveals that the way fault networks are aligned plays a crucial role in determining where an earthquake occurs and how strong it is. These findings challenge the traditional idea that it is the type of friction that occurs at these faults that primarily governs whether earthquakes occur or not, and could improve the current understanding of how earthquakes work.

“Our paper paints this very different picture of why earthquakes happen,” said Victor Tsai, a geophysicist at Brown University and one of the paper's lead authors. “This has very important implications for where earthquakes can be expected to occur versus where earthquakes cannot be expected, and also for predicting where earthquakes will be most damaging.”

Fault lines are the visible boundaries on the planet's surface where the solid plates that make up Earth's lithosphere collide with each other. For decades, geophysicists have interpreted earthquakes to occur when stress builds up on faults to the point where the faults rapidly slide or break over each other, releasing pent-up stress in an action known as slip behavior, Tsai says.

The researchers hypothesized that the rapid slip and the intense ground movements that follow are the result of unstable friction that can occur at faults. In contrast, the idea is that when friction is stable, plates slide against each other slowly without an earthquake occurring. This steady, smooth movement is also known as crawling.

“People try to measure these friction properties, like whether a fault zone has unstable friction or stable friction, and then, based on laboratory measurements of that, they try to predict whether or not you'll have an earthquake there,” Cai said. He said. “Our findings suggest that it may be more important to look at the geometry of faults in these fault networks, because it may be the complex geometry of the structures around those boundaries that creates this unstable versus stable behavior.”

The geometry to consider includes complexities in the underlying rock structures such as bends, gaps, and steps. The study is based on mathematical modeling and study of fault zones in California using data from the US Geological Survey's Quaternary Faults Database and from the California Geological Survey.

The research team, which also includes Brown University graduate student Jaesuk Lee and geophysicist Greg Hirth, provides a more detailed example to illustrate how earthquakes occur. They say to imagine defects colliding with each other as having serrated teeth like the edge of a saw. When there are fewer teeth or blunt teeth, rocks slide over each other more smoothly, allowing crawling. But when the rock structures in these faults are more complex and rough, these structures stick together and stick. When this happens, they increase the pressure, and eventually as they pull and push harder, they break, pulling apart and causing earthquakes.

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