The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. William A. Griffith to work with Dr. Giulio Di Tori at the Instituto Nazionale de Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) in Rome, Italy.
This project will contribute to a new state-of-the art lab which constrains high velocity rock friction experiments with observations from natural seismic and aseismic faults. Understanding the physico-chemical processes controlling earthquake generation is essential in seismic hazard assessment. Destructive earthquakes nucleate at depth (10-15 km), therefore monitoring active faults at the Earth?s surface, or interpreting seismic waves, yields only limited information on earthquake mechanics. Here participating scientists study the earthquake processes by: (i) studying fossil seismic sources now exhumed at the Earth's surface; (ii) working on a a new world class high velocity rock friction apparatus (HVRFA) to perform experiments under deformation conditions typical of earthquakes; (iii) analyzing natural and experimental fault rock materials using a novel multidisciplinary approach involving state of the art techniques in microstructural analysis, mineralogy and petrology; and (iv) producing new theoretical earthquake models calibrated (and firmly constrained) by field observations, mechanical data from rock-friction experiments and analyses of natural and experimental fault rocks.
