Researchers build better earthquake simulator
(Phys.org)—Traditional earthquake simulators have generally functioned by pressing two pieces of rock material together at high pressure until they reach a breaking point, resulting in something similar to the sticking and sliding of real earthquakes. The problem with this approach, of course, is that because of the difference in scale, it's not clear if the model can be used to accurately represent real events. For this reason, researchers from the University of Oklahoma and the U.S. Geological Survey tried a new approach, pressing a piece of granite against a rotating flywheel. As described in a paper published in the journal Science, the researchers discovered that the resulting energy densities compared closely with results from measurements of real earthquakes.