In this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER), an international research team plans to mobilize and drill a technically complex deep borehole into the fault zone that generated the devastating May 12, 2008 Mw 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake. A group led by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences will drill the hole. This project will support an upgrade to instrumentation that will be deployed in the first borehole through the fault. The upgrade will allow rapid temperature measurements through time as long as the sensors are operational at depth. This project will enable the investigators to obtain a rare data set that will be used to investigate fault friction which is the single most important physical process in an earthquake. The work also represents an important collaboration between scientists from the U.S. and China.
