Scientists have made further strides toward identifying the key circumstances for catastrophic earthquakes, according to a new study.
Scientists have made further strides toward identifying the key circumstances for catastrophic earthquakes, according to researchers.
The reason that earthquakes happen at all is because the earth’s crust is not one solid, unmoving piece. Instead, it’s made up of numerous tectonic plates that move very slowly as the earth’s molten core continues to move. This is the reason that continents have drifted over the earth’s lifespan. Earthquakes can vary wildly in size and strength, with the worst quakes capable of upending buildings, tearing apart cities and ending thousands of lives in an instant.
In pursuit of that goal, researchers created a test for this new study that looked at rocks from a well-known fault off of the coast of New Zealand. When put into a computer model, this data predicted that rocks of this type would be associated with a small, slow-motion earthquake around every two years, which aligns almost exactly with the actual data from this fault in New Zealand.
"This doesn't get us any closer to actually predicting earthquakes, but it does tell us whether a fault is likely to slip silently with no earthquakes, or have large ground-shaking earthquakes," Srisharan Shreedharan, assistant professor at Utah State University and study co-lead, said in the release.
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