Earthquakes can visibly and permanently crack the ground apart in dramatic and unpredictable surface fault rupture, but new research led by University of Michigan Engineering revealed that soil density strongly influences how and where they occur.
The research team, which includes collaborators at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), modeled soil as millions of particles interacting in order to represent the soil above a fault.
The first live video of surface fault rupture was captured in Myanmar in March 2025. Because of the absence of other real-time surface fault rupture videos, researchers rely on physical and virtual models to understand this rare hazard. But virtual models have been limited in the degree to which they reflect the behavior of physical sandbox models used in geology laboratory studies. To address that gap, the researchers leveraged the discrete element method, treating soil as a collection of distinct particles that interact more like real soil grains.
“Our goal is to quantify and anticipate how surface fault rupture will develop at the ground surface so we can accommodate the associated ground deformations in civil engineering design or retrofit whenever we cannot outright avoid the hazard,” said Estéfan Garcia, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at U-M and corresponding author of the study published in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering.
Source : umich.edu