MARGINS FELLOWSHIP: The effect of frictional properties in subduction zones on earthquake triggerability

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This is a MARGINS post-doctoral fellowship project.The post-doc will investigate how fault zone thicknesses affects large-scale fault stability at subduction zones. The specific tasks to be accomplished are: 1. Assessment of aftershock productivity on the Northern Costa Rican, Southern Costa Rican, and Nankai subduction zones to establish stability differences between subduction zones with varying frictional properties. 2. Investigation of the potential for remote triggering at the Costa Rican margin through high pass filtering of large earthquake waveforms. 3. Development of analytical models showing the relationships between fault gouge thickness, force chains, asperity contact and the critical slip distance over which a fault weakens enough to fail dynamically. This is an ambitious project for two years, but if successful will help us understand how strain builds in various subduction settings, and how frequently the strain must be relieved as well as how such events can be triggered.The potential broader impacts of this project include the benefit to society with respect to improving our understanding of earthquake triggering as well as the training of a promising young female researcher.