Artificial peridotite takes its gold coat off . Credit: Thomas P. Ferrand (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
Sometimes in order to test a theory about how processes work below the surface of the Earth, scientists need to recreate minerals found in very specific circumstances. This photograph was taken through a binocular microscope during a critical step of the creation of artificial peridotite: extraction of the artificial peridotite from its gold capsule. The sample is a little cylinder, 3 mm long with a diameter of 2.1 mm, sintered from micrometric powders of San Carlos olivine and Corsica antigorite.
Such samples have been used to reproduce earthquakes in the laboratory using a Deformation-DIA apparatus. Thanks to these artificial samples, a new model has been developed that has come to explain intermediate-depth earthquakes: the Dehydration-Driven Stress Transfer (DDST).
Description by Thomas P. Ferrand, after the description on imaggeo.egu.eu.
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