{"id":142089,"date":"2025-09-16T22:13:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T22:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/142089\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T22:13:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T22:13:06","slug":"around-90-of-an-earthquakes-energy-doesnt-do-what-you-think-it-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/142089\/","title":{"rendered":"Around 90% of an Earthquake\u2019s Energy Doesn\u2019t Do What You Think It Does"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earthquakes can be deadly and disastrous. But what we feel may constitute a tiny sliver of an earthquake\u2019s destructive energy, according to a new experiment.<\/p>\n

In a recent AGU Advances<\/a> paper, researchers describe how they created \u201clab quakes,\u201d or miniature versions of natural earthquakes created in a controlled laboratory. Doing so allowed the team to derive a complete energy budget for the quakes, a \u201csimplified analog\u201d of real-life earthquakes, they reported in the paper.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, they found that only around 10% of a quake\u2019s energy causes the physical shaking most people associate with earthquakes. Overall, anywhere between 68 and 98% of the energy goes into generating heat around a quake\u2019s epicenter. Less than 1% of that energy is used to break up rock and create new surfaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur experiments offer an integrated approach that provides one of the most complete views of the physics of earthquake-like ruptures in rocks to date,\u201d Mat\u011bj Pe\u010d, study co-author and a geophysicist at MIT, told MIT News<\/a>. \u201cThis will provide clues on how to improve our current earthquake models and natural hazard mitigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

An artificial disaster <\/p>\n

For the experiment, the team used granite samples to mimic the seismogenic layer, a section of the Earth\u2019s crust where earthquakes typically originate. The goal was to simulate the microphysical processes during an earthquake that push rocky layers to slip along a fault zone, according to the paper.<\/p>\n

They ground up the granite into a fine powder and mixed it with magnetic particles, with the particles serving as a temperature marker for the researchers. Then, they placed the sample under steadily increasing pressure conditions that replicated natural, pre-earthquake conditions.<\/p>\n

From the changes in miniature seismic layers\u2019 physical properties, the researchers determined the energy dynamics of each lab quake. They also found that the energy budget changed according to a region\u2019s deformation history, or \u201cessentially what the rock remembers,\u201d Daniel Ortega-Arroyo, the study\u2019s lead author and a graduate student, explained to MIT News.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat history affects a lot of the material properties in the rock, and it dictates to some degree how it is going to slip,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Scaling up to reality <\/p>\n

The team believes that the physics of lab quakes closely mirror that of real earthquakes. Certainly, the real world is much more complicated, but the experiment sufficiently characterizes the core physical processes in play during seismic quakes, they claimed.<\/p>\n

The findings demonstrate a viable way to bypass the \u201cspatial and temporal limitations of our current seismological tools and geological observations,\u201d the researchers said. At the very least, the study could help inform the creation of a physical model for earthquake dynamics or seismologists\u2019 efforts to pick out regions most vulnerable to earthquakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could never reproduce the complexity of the Earth, so we have to isolate the physics of what is happening in these lab quakes,\u201d Pe\u010d said. \u201cWe hope to understand these processes and try to extrapolate them to nature.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earthquakes can be deadly and disastrous. But what we feel may constitute a tiny sliver of an earthquake\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[2659,1397,32552,90,38246,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-142089","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-earthquakes","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-geology","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-seismology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}