Science & Suds – Earthquakes

Earthquakes cause ground shaking that can destroy cities, leaving over 64 thousand people dead in 2023 alone. The shaking comes from waves that are radiated away from an underground crack (or fault) in the earth that slips very suddenly. Despite decades

of research, we are still unable to predict when and where a fault will slip or even accurately estimate the maximum size of an earthquake that a specific region might experience. Here, I discuss how we createearthquakes in my lab at Cornell University in order to better understand the physics and mechanics of fault slip and ground shaking. We squeeze 3-m sized samples of rock and plastic, generate laboratory earthquakes, and analyze data recorded with arrays of sensors to understand how such earthquakes start and what causes an earthquake rupture to stop.