Assume you are under stress. What do you do? Take a walk in the park, order your favorite takeout, have a breakdown, or internally slip along preferred slip systems and develop a fabric? The response will mostly depend on what kind of material you are, how much stress you are under, and what environmental conditions you are subjected to. For instance, someone might listen to classical music after ...[Read More]
How do rocks fail and flow: A beginners guide to rock rheology
The field of rock rheology may seem a bit ‘odd’ at first glance to those geoscientists who are vaguely familiarized with the topic of geodynamics. Often, rocks are considered massive and competent geomaterials that display a sudden (and sometimes violent) brittle failure (earthquake alert!). However, when considering the high temperatures and large timescale characteristics of most geo ...[Read More]
Simulating the Deep Earth with MAGEMin: A Toolkit for Thermodynamic Modeling in Geodynamics
Understanding how rocks melt, deform, and evolve within Earth’s interior is a central challenge in geoscience. These processes span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are governed by complex interactions between temperature, pressure, composition, and phase stability. Capturing this complexity in numerical models requires integrating mineral thermodynamics directly into geodynamic mod ...[Read More]
Don’t Stop Me Now: A Fracture Mechanics Perspective on Earthquake Nucleation
How do earthquakes start? Earthquakes occur when a block of rock rapidly slides past another along an interface or a discontinuity in the medium and release energy in the form of seismic waves. Turns out, the surface of the earth is riddled with a lot of these discontinuities, which we call “faults”. If we plot the locations of earthquakes on a world map (Figure 1a), we will see that they highligh ...[Read More]