
September 24, 2025
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Most earthquake energy is launched as heat, not vibrating
A new research shows up to 98 percent of the earthquake energy to the heating rocks in the flash, not the shock of the Earth. The result can help achieve better earthquake expectations
The shake that results from an earthquake can break the ground, fall buildings and cause massive rocks. All this destructive power, amazingly, is just a small part of the overall energy of the earthquake.
A new laboratory study in AGU applied It finds that the accounts are shaken only 1 to 8 percent of the energy issued in an earthquakeWhile up to 98 percent of that energy is dispensed as heat. The friction of the huge rocks that slip against each other can increase the Earth’s temperature to more than 1700 degrees Celsius – enough to dissolve quartz and other minerals.
It is difficult to measure the amount of earthquake energy that goes to the ground in exchange for breaking the rocks in exchange for heating the flash, given that the earthquakes begin deeply below the surface of the earth and occur at unpredictable intervals. To understand this energy budget, Daniel Ortega Aroyo, a post -PhD researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues, created laboratory earthquakes by pressing the center’s size of powder size of dried granite and magnetic particle mixture between aluminum quantities until they are expired or adhered to. They measured this cracking process under stress using heat measuring devices and photovoltaic sensors that simulate the earthquakes used to measure real earthquakes.
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Even these earthquakes on a centimeter are hot. “I have mainly moved from room temperature to the top of 900 ° C in a few metal fats-very quickly,” says Ortega Aroo.
The researchers found between 68 and 98 percent of the energy released in these laboratory earthquakes. It took up to less than 1 percent of the energy to up to 32 percent, while shaking is 8 percent or less. Ortega Aroiu, who indicates that the history of the rocks in a mistake may control the extent of heating heating, and shaking in the next earthquake, which indicates that the history of the rocks in a mistake may control the amount of energy in heating and shaking in the next earthquake, which indicates that the history of the rocks in an error may control the amount of energy that goes in heating and shaking in the next earthquake.
“The new research is important because the earthquake budget for earthquake” is “unknown.” “It is very essential to understanding earthquakes and thus the ability to design them.” Seismic computer models are used in everything to determine how the local building -resistant buildings should be to try to know when the error will collapse after that and the extent of the resulting earthquake.
Hayather Savage, an earthquake researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that one of the work feature is that it uses a new technology that measures the alignment of magnetic minerals in hot rocks to help explain the temperature change. Savage, who did not participate in the study, performs field analyzes of the rocks melted on old rift lines. She says that these studies in the real world use magnetic analysis, and the presence of the same measurements in the real world and in the laboratory can help expand the scope of results from a centimeter chip to a multi -term error.
“How can I extract this to something like an earthquake on San Andreas’s mistake?” Savage says. “This may be a very big question for us to think.”
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