Killer Qualities of Japanese Fault Revealed

Lasrick sends this report from Nature News: "The devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan shocked researchers who did not expect that the seismic fault involved could release so much energy. Now the world's deepest-drilling oceanographic ship has been able to pin down the odd geology that made this disaster so horrific. The fault turns out to be unusually thin and weak, the researchers report in Science this week1–3. The results will help to pin down whether other offshore faults around the world are capable of triggering the same scale of disaster. ... The coring revealed a very thin clay layer, about 5 meters thick, separating the two sliding tectonic plates (abstract). 'That’s just weird,' says Emily Brodsky of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), who is an author on all three Science papers this week. 'Usually it’s tens of meters or more.' Lab tests confirmed that this wet clay layer is extremely slippery, and gets even more so under stress (abstract). As sliding creates friction and heat, water in the clay gets pressurized and pushes up against the impermeable rock around it. That 'jacks open the fault” says Brodsky, allowing it to slip even more. The temperature sensors found that more than a year after the quake, the fault was still up to 0.31 C warmer than its surroundings (abstract). From this they could extrapolate how much heat was generated from friction during the sliding event. Their calculations confirmed the very low friction of the 5-meter-thick clay layer."

Comments

Oh... FAULT... that makes more sense

[damn_registrars]

The first couple times I saw the title I thought it said "Killer Qualities of Japanese Fruit Revealed". Granted, that also could have been really interesting.

So can we stop it?

[mysidia]

Perhaps by drilling millions of holes; and driving millions of rods of steel rebar into the clay, to reinforce the fault line.

Yeah, that'll fix it, for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that'll totally prevent any further earthquakes, for sure. After all, it's a fault line that's only 1250 km long. It's merely 230 billion tonnes of rock in one of the smallest Pacific plates pushing against the Siberio-Eurasian plate that's estimated to weigh upward of 7.4 trillion tonnes. We're only talking about roughly 25 billion Joules of energy involved during minor seismic events, and upwards of 150 billion Joules during more severe quakes. And the fault line is only under 14 km of water, where even sending down the most basic of probes and drilling apparatus is extremely difficult and costly (like the article makes blatantly obvious, had you bothered to read it).

What you say is totally plausible and economically feasible. I would be very surprised if they don't do exactly what you propose, and have it fixed up within maybe 6 to 8 months. Some rebar and concrete is clearly the solution. Clearly.