These “clockwork” earthquakes puzzled scientists for decades — new Indiana University study explains why
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1128510
https://news.iu.edu/college/live/news/51003-iu-researcher-helps-solve-mystery-of
INTRO: Deep beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean about 1,000 miles off the coast of Ecuador, a fault line on the seafloor has been generating magnitude 6 earthquakes with almost clocklike regularity for at least three decades. The earthquakes strike every five to six years, in nearly the same places, at nearly the same size.
That kind of predictability is almost unheard of in earthquake science. And for years, researchers have known the pattern existed without fully understanding why. Now they do. In a new study published in the journal Science, scientists reveal the physical mechanism behind this remarkable behavior. The answer, it turns out, lies in a pair of unusual zones within the fault itself, zones that act like built-in brakes on earthquake magnitude... (MORE - no ads)
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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1128510
https://news.iu.edu/college/live/news/51003-iu-researcher-helps-solve-mystery-of
INTRO: Deep beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean about 1,000 miles off the coast of Ecuador, a fault line on the seafloor has been generating magnitude 6 earthquakes with almost clocklike regularity for at least three decades. The earthquakes strike every five to six years, in nearly the same places, at nearly the same size.
That kind of predictability is almost unheard of in earthquake science. And for years, researchers have known the pattern existed without fully understanding why. Now they do. In a new study published in the journal Science, scientists reveal the physical mechanism behind this remarkable behavior. The answer, it turns out, lies in a pair of unusual zones within the fault itself, zones that act like built-in brakes on earthquake magnitude... (MORE - no ads)
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