Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

Faults can slip suddenly as earthquakes, but also slowly and still energetically as slow-slip events. Slow-slip events are observed in subduction zones that host powerful megathrust earthquakes, but how these slow movements are generated is still under debate.

Ozawa et al. [2024] present a unique view about the generation of slow-slip events from the lens of the so-called ‘fault valve mechanism’, in which the cyclic changes of fluid pressure in fault zones promote slow movements, even when the faults are considered frictionally stable. The authors provide elegant analytical solutions and numerical simulations of conditions under which these slow-slip events occur and make predictions about their propagation speed and rate of occurrence. The mechanism predicts that such fluid-induced slow-slip events should advance along the fault in the direction of fluid flow.

Though it still needs to be tested using geophysical data, this new mechanism has great potential to explain the ubiquitous existence of slow-slip events in global subduction zones.

Citation: Ozawa, S., Yang, Y., & Dunham, E. M. (2024). Fault-valve instability: A mechanism for slow slip events. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 129, e2024JB029165. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB029165

—Yihe Huang, Associate Editor, JGR: Solid Earth

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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