A period of slow, creeping movement without any shaking may be a necessary prelude to earthquakes, a new study suggests.
The research, which was on the fundamentals of how materials rupture, focused on cracks snaking through sheets of plastic in a laboratory. But the experiments revealed some basic physics of how fractures work — particularly how a buildup of friction at the interface of two bodies transforms into a sudden rupture. And those findings do apply to real-world earthquakes, said study author Jay Fineberg, a physicist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
