![\"Cracked](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Fiery-crater.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The shaking produced by an earthquake can crack the ground, bring down buildings and cause massive rockfalls. All this destructive power is, astoundingly, just a fraction of a quake\u2019s overall energy.<\/p>\n
A new laboratory study in AGU Advances finds that shaking accounts for only 1 to 8 percent of the energy released in an earthquake<\/a>, while up to a whopping 98 percent of that energy dissipates as heat. The friction of huge rock chunks sliding against one another can spike the temperature of the ground to more than 1,700 degrees Celsius\u2014hot enough to melt quartz and other minerals.<\/p>\n It\u2019s challenging to measure how much of an earthquake\u2019s energy goes to shaking the ground versus breaking rocks versus flash heating, given that quakes start deep below Earth\u2019s surface and happen at unpredictable intervals. To understand this energy budget, Daniel Ortega-Arroyo, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues created itty-bitty lab earthquakes by pressing centimeter-sized wafers of a powdered granite and magnetic particle mixture between aluminum pistons until the wafers slipped or snapped. They measured this process of cracking under stress with thermometers and piezoelectric sensors that mimic the seismographs used to measure real earthquakes.<\/p>\n On supporting science journalism<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n Even these centimeter-scale earthquakes got hot fast. \u201cIt essentially went from room temperature to above 900 degrees C in a few microseconds\u2014so extremely, extremely fast,\u201d Ortega-Arroyo says.<\/p>\n Between 68 and 98 percent of the energy released in these lab quakes dissipated as heat, the researchers found. The breaking of the wafer took anywhere from less than 1 percent of the energy to as much as 32 percent, whereas the shaking made up 8 percent or less. Samples that had been more deformed before breaking experienced a little less heating, Ortega-Arroyo says, which indicates that the history of the rocks in a fault might control how much energy goes to heating, rock-breaking and shaking in the next quake.<\/p>\n The new research is important because the energy budget of earthquakes is \u201ca huge unknown,\u201d says Rachel Abercrombie, an earthquake researcher at Boston University, who was not involved in the study but discussed the experiments with the authors before publication. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty fundamental to understanding the earthquakes and therefore being able to model them.\u201d Earthquake computer models are used for everything from determining how quakeproof local buildings<\/a> should be to trying to figure out when a fault will break next and how big the resulting quake will be.<\/p>\n One advantage of the work is that it used a new technique measures the alignment of magnetic minerals in heated rock to help interpret the temperature change, says Heather Savage, an earthquake researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Savage, who wasn\u2019t involved in the study, does field analyses of melted rocks on old fault lines. These real-world studies also use magnetic analysis, she says, and having the same measurements in the real world and in the lab can help scale the findings from a centimeter-sized wafer to a multikilometer-long fault.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do I extrapolate this to something like an earthquake on the San Andreas fault?\u201d Savage says. \u201cThat\u2019s probably a pretty big question for us to mull over.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s Time to Stand Up for Science<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/a>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts<\/a>, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters<\/a>, must-watch videos, challenging games<\/a>, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription<\/a>.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"September 24, 2025 2 min read Most of an Earthquake\u2019s Energy Is Released as Heat, Not Shaking Up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-46403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}