https://phys.org/news/2024-02-plate-bou ... tress.html
by Aaron Sidder, Eos
Temperature and shear stress are two influential variables that affect faulting and seismicity in subduction zones, where tectonic plates converge. Yet because earthquakes originate tens of kilometers below Earth's surface at plate boundaries, the effects of temperature and the magnitude of stress are poorly understood and hotly debated.
Philip England and colleagues explored these variables at the plate boundary in northern Honshu, Japan's largest island and the setting of the devastating Tōhoku earthquake in 2011—the most powerful ever recorded in Japan. The authors used a dense set of heat flux measurements collected from 100-meter-deep boreholes as a proxy for measurements at the inaccessible plate interface.
The findings are published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems.
