Evidence supporting New Geophysics

Abstract

In the last decade a New Geophysics has been proposed, whereby the crust and uppermost ~400 km of the mantle of the Earth are so pervaded by closely-spaced stress-aligned microcracks (intergranular films of hydrated melt in the mantle) that in situ rocks verge on failure by fracturing, and hence are critical-systems that impose a range of fundamentally-new properties on conventional sub-critical geophysics. Enough of these new properties have been observed to confirm that New Geophysics is a new understanding of fluid/rock deformation with important implications and applications. Evidence supporting New Geophysics has been published in a wide variety of publications. Here, for clarification, we summarise in one document the evidence supporting New Geophysics.

Keywords

• earthquakes
• eruptions
• microcracks
• new geophysics
• shear-wave splitting
• stress-forecasting