The scientific community has increased its efforts to develop techniques to foresee these catastrophes and potentially even lessen their effects as a series of terrible earthquakes have shaken Turkey and, dare we say, our entire planet in many ways. But given that tectonic action has been frustratingly elusive for so long, we often equate it with extremely abstract ideas.
What if we told you that all it takes to gain a better understanding of earthquakes is an understanding of the physics underlying why lifting a big box off the ground is harder than keeping it moving?
Because the clay-rich rocks inside the fault are exceedingly slow to heal, the researchers came up with a test that blended rocks from a well-studied fault off the coast of New Zealand with a computer model to predict that a harmless form of “slow motion” earthquake would happen every few years.
According to study co-lead Srisharan Shreedharan, “This doesn’t bring us any closer to really predicting earthquakes, but it does tell us whether a fault is likely to slip silently with no earthquakes or have significant ground-shaking earthquakes.”