Earthquake Nucleation and Foreshock Mechanisms: cascade triggering, pre-slip, or fluid flows?

Understanding the nucleation process of large earthquakes is crucial for accurate earthquake prediction and seismic hazard mitigation. While earthquake nucleation process has been widely observed in the laboratory and numerical simulation, it is difficult to observe them directly in the field. Some studies have considered foreshocks as the by-product of such nucleation process. Many large earthquakes also have...

Forest Recovery from Hurricane Disturbances

Hurricanes are a major disturbance to tropical forests. We used census observations at Bisley Experimental Watersheds (BEW) in Puerto Rico to study the mortality after hurricane Hugo in 1989 and after hurricane Maria in 2017 and the subsequent recovery of the forest after hurricane Hugo between 1989 and 2014 (the last census before hurricane Maria). We found that hurricane-induced mortality varied with species/plant functional types (PFTs) and stem sizes. Specifically, palms had the lowest mortality, followed by mid and late...

Earthquake Insights From the Best Recorded Volcanic Caldera Collapse In History

Two outstanding problems in seismology are predicting the recurrence times of earthquakes and understanding the physical processes that immediately precede them. While geodetic measurements record elastic strain accumulation, most faults have recurrence intervals far longer than available measurements. Foreshocks provide the principal observations of processes prior to mainshocks, yet variability between sequences has limited generalizations of pre-failure behavior. In 2018 Kilauea volcano...

Alissar Yehya, Baha and Walid Bassatne Department of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Energy, AUB, Beirut, Lebanon; Associate, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University 

Title: Influence of fluid-assisted healing on fault permeability structure

Abstract:
Micro-cracks in fault damage zones can heal through diffusive mass transfer controlled by temperature and pressure. The diffusion of pore fluid pressure in fault damage zones...

Chengxin Jiang, Harvard University

Title: TBD

Magali Billen, UC Davis

Episodic Plate Motion and Thermal Structure in Subduction Zones Caused by Slab Folding in the Transition Zone

Abstract: Although most present-day subduction zones are in trench retreat, plate reconstructions and geological observations show that individual margins experience episodes of advancing, retreating or stationary trench motion with time-variable subduction rates. However, most laboratory and numerical simulations predict steady plate velocities and sustained trench retreat unless the slab experiences folding in the...