What are the signs that nature is telling us?’ Scientists are triggering earthquakes in the Alps to find out what happens before one hits
Scientists are deliberately triggering earthquakes from a tunnel deep in the Alps. Although it may sound like a James Bond film, the goal is not chaos and destruction. On the contrary, researchers from Fault activation and seismic rupture (FEAR) are looking for ways to determine the danger of an earthquake before it happens.
Despite increasing monitoring of fault lines around the world, researchers still do not understand the immediate triggers of these phenomena. earthquakes. They also don’t know why some ruptures occur on short segments of fault lines while others extend for several kilometers, causing even greater destruction. Currently, geoscientists are limited to studying these events only after they have occurred, Dominique Giardiniprofessor of seismology and geodynamics at ETH Zürich, told Live Science.
This means they have to trigger real earthquakes under controlled conditions with thousands of monitors directly on a fault – not an easy prospect. But Giardini and his colleagues are themselves taking advantage of the massive power of the Alps. These mountains, on the border of Switzerland and Italy, are deeply faulted; the zigzag networks of cracks beneath them are the legacy of millions of years of tectonic. The compressive force of the towering mountains above is enough to fracture rocks 1 to 2 kilometers below the surface.
The rocks located on the sides of these faults occasionally slide, releasing especially small earthquakes. Using a pre-existing tunnel that was once used in the construction of a rail project, Project FEAR gets up close to one of these faults and pumps water into it to trigger earthquakes at an opportune moment.
“These would have happened sooner or later in the history of the Alps, but we are making sure that they happen next week,” Giardini said.
The process is similar to what happens when oil and gas companies inject wastewater from wells into faulted areas in places like Oklahoma and Texas. This water lubricates the faults, reducing the friction necessary for them to rupture.
The difference is that Giardini and his team have a dense network of seismometers and accelerometers directly on the fault, allowing them to measure exactly how it is moving in response to this decrease in friction. The team has already triggered hundreds of thousands of zero-magnitude earthquakes. (Since earthquakes are measured on a nonlinear logarithmic scale, it is possible to have very small earthquakes with magnitudes of zero or even with negative magnitudes.)
Next week, researchers will begin injecting hot water into the fault to see how temperature affects the evolution of an earthquake. And in March, Giardini said, they will start triggering earthquakes up to magnitude 1.
The idea is that if they can determine what parameters trigger an earthquake of a certain size – if they can, in essence, trigger an earthquake of the size they want – they will eventually be able to measure a dangerous fault in the real world before it ruptures and calculate the kinds of stresses needed to trigger an earthquake of a certain size on that fault.
“A few years ago [in February 2023]there was a very large earthquake on the border between Syria and Turkey,” Giardini said. “We know that this fault will continue south and north. We want to try to understand: will the next earthquake be magnitude 7, 8 or 8.5?”
Already, he says, certain parameters, such as the extent of deformation in the rocks outside the fault, are proving important. Researchers are also beginning to better understand how earthquakes move from one fault to a neighboring fault.
“We’re seeing examples that we’re producing ourselves underground that look a lot like what’s happening in nature,” Giardini said.
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