{"id":15980,"date":"2026-01-06T22:32:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T22:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/06\/under-10-of-an-earthquakes-energy-makes-the-ground-shake\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T22:32:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T22:32:31","slug":"under-10-of-an-earthquakes-energy-makes-the-ground-shake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/06\/under-10-of-an-earthquakes-energy-makes-the-ground-shake\/","title":{"rendered":"Under 10% of an earthquake\u2019s energy makes the ground shake"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over millennia\u2014energy that, once released, we perceive mainly in the form of the ground\u2019s shaking. But a quake also generates a flash of heat and fractures and damages underground rocks. And exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult to measure in the field.<\/p>\n<p>Now, with the help of carefully controlled miniature \u201clab quakes,\u201d MIT geophysicist Mat\u011bj Pe\u010d and colleagues have quantified this so-called energy budget. Only about 1% to 10% of a lab quake\u2019s energy causes physical shaking, they found, while 1% to 30% goes into breaking up rock and creating new surfaces. The vast majority heats up the area around a quake\u2019s epicenter, producing a temperature spike that can actually melt surrounding material.<\/p>\n<p>The team also found that the fractions of quake energy producing heat, shaking, and rock fracturing can shift depending on the tectonic activity the region has experienced in the past. \u201cThe deformation history\u2014essentially what the rock remembers\u2014really influences how destructive an earthquake could be,\u201d says postdoc Daniel Ortega-Arroyo, PhD \u201925, lead author of a <a href=\"https:\/\/agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/full\/10.1029\/2025AV001683\">paper<\/a> on the work. \u201cThat history affects a lot of the material properties in the rock, and it dictates to some degree how it is going to slip.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The lab quakes\u2014which involve subjecting specially prepared samples of powdered granite and magnetic particles to steadily increasing pressure in a custom-built apparatus\u2014are a simplified analogue of what occurs during a natural earthquake. Down the road, if scientists have an idea of how much shaking a quake generated in the past, they might be able to estimate the degree to which the quake\u2019s energy also affected rocks deep underground by melting or breaking them apart. This in turn could reveal how much more or less vulnerable that region is to future quakes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over  [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}