Earthquake mechanisms: from nano to macro
Each year earthquakes cause thousands to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. To minimize the risk it is of utmost importance to understand the underlying principles of earthquakes and how they work. In addition to natural earthquakes, there are also man-made processes that can lead to earthquakes, such as the exploitation of oil and gas, the use of geothermal energy and the underground storage of CO2. These processes can exacerbate the problem.
Tiny grains
Earthquakes occur when friction causes the Earth’s plates to shake rather than to move smoothly. Although an earthquake can be massive on scale, the place where an earthquake begins can be due to small faults often no larger than a few millimetres. About a year ago a group of Earth scientists in the High Pressure & Temperature Lab (HPT lab) and the Structural Geology group at Utrecht University discovered that the cores of the fault zones are made-up of miniscule grains, which can be as small as a 100,000th of a millimetre. Thus, in order to further our understanding of earthquake-prone fault behaviour it is of importance to constrain the properties of these nanoparticles.
Building a bridge
Dr. Oliver Plümper is one of the researchers and has received a NWO grant to further investigate the mechanism of nanoparticle deformation. His focus is on finding connections between the fields of rock deformation and nanogeosciences, with the aim of improving our understanding about how nanoscale processes are associated with earthquake mechanisms.