Summary
This award will fund research to address a grand challenge in the geophysics community: deep-focus earthquakes, which are earthquakes that originate at depths greater than 70km below the Earth’s surface. Although there is no consensus on the processes that cause the sudden release of energy that results in a deep-focus earthquake, there are three agreed-upon mechanisms that could occur individually or together during a deep-focus earthquake event. These mechanisms are 1) the transformation of minerals from one phase to another, 2) the dehydration of rocks, which causes them to become easier to
