Two stone discs and a flywheel may sound like a Flintstonian vehicle, but in fact, it’s the recipe for a new, rather high-tech device that scientists are using to study earthquakes in the lab, described in a recent Science paper.
In an actual earthquake, two jagged rock faces slide past each other at fault lines, and the energy of that collision propagates through the earth in waves. In this experiment, the researchers simulate a fault line using two stone disks one atop the other and a 500-pound metal flywheel. In the simulated quake, the energy of the spinning flywheel is transmitted to the bottom disc through a shaft (or clutch, for those more familiar with cars), and the bottom disc starts spinning, moving past the top disc until friction brings the “slip” grinding to a halt.
Previously, scientists applied pressure to opposing rock surfaces to simulate quakes, but that pressure was not great enough to mimic large ones. This experimental setup approximates quakes of magnitudes 4 through 8, which is quite a range, since earthquakes are measured on a logarithmic scale. Magnitude 4 is considered a light quake (one struck near the California-Mexico border in May 2012), …
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