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The Mechanics of Earthquake Faulting

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DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511818516

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The mechanics of
earthquakes and faulting
Second Edition
By Christopher H. Scholz
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Paperback (Hardback), 471 pages, GBP
32.95, ISBN 0521655404
This is the welcome second edition of the
same title published in 1990. Since the first
edition has been read widely, it may not be
necessary to introduce the main composition
of the new edition, which has been kept
unchanged. However, I will first mention the
chapters for those who have not read the first
edition. They are:
1 Brittle fracture of rock
2 Rock friction
3 Mechanics of faulting
4 Mechanics of earthquakes
5 The seismic cycle
6 Seismotectonics
7 Earthquake prediction and hazard
analysis
As the titles of the book and chapters
indicate, one of the main themes of Professor
Scholz’s book is to build a bridge between
seismology (earthquakes) and geology
(faults), through rock mechanics. Although
the causal relationship between earthquakes
and faults has been recognized for over a
century, which is cause and which is effect
has not been so clear. It was a feat of modern
seismology to show that sudden fault motion
can generate seismic waves as observed.
Now, it is clear that an earthquake is a mani-
festation of sudden fault motion. Then, the
next question to ask would be why do faults
move? Plate tectonics, which provided the
first logically consistent explanations for
most of solid earth’s phenomena, answers
this question as well. Fault motion is a result,
direct or indirect, of plate motions. Then,
why do plates move? The answer is that the
plate motion is driven by the convective
motion of the solid earth by which Earth
cools. Solid earth geoscience has made a rev-
olutionary advance in this direction, towards
understanding large or global scale phenom-
ena, during the last thirty or so years. The
approach has been straightforward, and the
answers are simple. There are many text
books dealing with this revolution at differ-
ent levels.
There should be, however, another
direction at each step of revolution, towards
the small or detailed scale, to quest for why
and how. In the case of faults, the physics to
link geological observation with earthquakes
is rock mechanics in which faults are treated
as shear cracks and their propagation, unsta-
bl lidi i d b th l ffi
problems related to the wide range of spatial
and temporal scales between laboratory and
nature. It was not easy to grasp the state of
the art for outsiders, including the present
reviewer, as there was no single book which
started from the fundamental principles.
Scholz stated in the Preface of the first
edition that his intent was to fill this gap, and
he was successful. This was because he was
thorough in relating the fundamental rock
mechanics developed in the first three chap-
ters to every possible geophysical and geo-
logical observation in the later chapters.
Each chapter starts with a historical review
and explanation of the basics, and attains the
cutting edge frontier on each issue. In the
second edition, developments during the last
decade (1990–2001), notably the phenomena
of fault interactions and the critical role
played by the rate and state friction law, have
been incorporated, taking into full account
the results of recent developments in space
geodesy, stress measurements and seismic
inversion techniques.
Chapter 1, starting from the classical
works by Coulomb, Mohr, Griffith, and
Orowan, treats topics such as recent crack
models, strength at different scales, effects of
pore fluids and brittle-plastic transition. It is
mentioned that while strength decreases with
the scale, the energy for fracture increases
with crack size. Chapter 2 concentrates on
friction. Fault motions, and therefore earth-
quakes, are controlled by frictional sliding,
which is different from fracture. Starting
again from the very classical Leonardo da
Vinci and Amontons, the chapter goes on to
the physical mechanism of friction, based on
"topography" of contact surfaces, and, to the
rate and state friction law, that allows one to
treat the whole spectrum from stable to
unstable sliding, and therefore, to deal with
not only earthquake but also the whole seis-
mic cycle. Chapter 3 is about the mechanics
of faulting. Starting from Anderson's classi-
cal theory on the relationship between faults
and stress state, recent topics on the growth
of long faults and fault interactions are pre-
sented. One of the other aspects of interest is
the long-standing debate on whether tectonic
stress is strong or weak. The enigma of no
high heat flow anomaly in the San Andreas
area is discussed in this connection taking
into account all relevant information, such as
th di ti f th P i i it t
Book Reviews 49
to seismology than the preceding chapters.
After a historical review and presentation of
basic dynamics of crack models at the earth-
quake occurrence, indicating that stress drop,
rather than stress, is the most fundamental
scaling parameter, the topic of moment and
fault size of large and small earthquakes
obeying different scaling relationships is dis-
cussed in detail. Section 4.5 is a new section
dealing with the mechanics of earthquake
interactions which has attracted intense inter-
est of seismologists since the 1992 Landers
earthquake in California. The analysis that a
static stress change as low as 0.1 bar can trig-
ger seismicity is a surprise, but this may be
explained by the rate-state friction laws. It is
also shown that even the transient stress
change caused by seismic waves can trigger
seismicity. Chapter 5 deals with cyclic seis-
micity under tectonic loading, Reid's elastic
rebound theory (1910) being a typical exam-
ple. A similar notion has been developed for
subduction zones, such as Japan’s Nankaido
area. This idea is supported by the tenet of
plate tectonics and GPS observations, and
the concept of seismic gaps was born as a
strategy in earthquake prediction . Chapter 6,
Seismotectonics, is essentially a review of
seismicity within the framework of plate tec-
tonics, to which slow and tsunami earth-
quakes are newly added. The last chapter,
Chapter 7, deals with earthquake prediction
and hazard analysis, namely a scrutiny of dif-
ferent precursors with examples and models.
The electromagnetic precursors are treated in
a very cursory way to some disappointment
of the reviewer, but they are not the author’s
specialty. The reviewer, however, was
pleased by Section 7.1.3, which soundly
quashed the view that short-term prediction
is impossible based on the self-organized
criticality argument, as misunderstanding the
nature of chaos and complexity. It is clear
that to forecast the near future is much easier
than the distant future.
This book is by no means easy reading
for those who are not familiar with the sub-
ject, in particular the technical terms for
important notions. The serious readers are
advised to read the first three chapters care-
fully again and again, and come back to them
repeatedly in reading further chapters. This
will be a rewarding exercise. For this, many
useful cross-references are provided through-
out the book. The historical reviews and the
parts describing the fundamental issues in
each chapter are quite enlightening. How-
ever, readers are cautioned not to take every
word as gospel for the more recent contro-
versial issues and to keep in mind that there
may always be some alternative and even
better views. Such critical reading is likely
what the author expects and will appreciate.
Seiya Uyeda
Earthquake Prediction Research Center
T k iU i i Shi i
50
The color of oil: The
history, the money and the
politics of the world’s
biggest business
By Michael Economides and
Ronald Oligney
Round Oak Publishing Company, Katy,
Texas, xii + 203 pp., 2000 (US$24.95),
ISBN 0-9677248-0-5
Hubbert’s peak: The
impending world oil
shortage
By Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Princeton University Press, Princeton
and Oxford, x + 208 pp., 2001
(US$24.95), ISBN 0-69086-6
In his best seller, The Prize: The Epic Quest
for Oil, Money and Order (1991), Daniel
Yergin rightly argued that the twentieth cen-
tury was the century of petroleum. In this
first decade of the new century, our civiliza-
tion is still at the mercy (or under the spell) of
petroleum. Winston Churchill once remarked
that in the oil game, “the mastery itself was
the prize of the venture.” About 90 percent
of world energy consumption is supplied by
fossil fuels (60% oil and gas, and 30% by
coal). Despite this mastery of oil in our daily
life and world economies, the petroleum
industry is a mystery to most people includ-
ing geologists. Most of the books available
on petroleum geology and industry are too
technical for others to read. Therefore, the
publication of non-technical books on petro-
leum geology and industry such as The Color
of Oil and Hubbert’s Peak is welcome. Geo-
science researchers, teachers, students, man-
agers, editors and journalists will find these
books informative and useful.
The authors of these books are “oil aca-
demics,” so to speak (Economides and
Oligney at the University of Houston, and
Deffeyes at Princeton University). Their
books speak from within and for the petro-
leum industry, in which geoscientists play an
important role.
Although the authors of both books
start from the same point, they reach oppos-
ing conclusions (more on this later), and
these represent two contrasting views of the
(near) future of petroleum reserves and
industry.
Oil has been regarded by some as black
gold and by others as black pollution. The
th f Th C l f Oil h tt t dt
ter 1 is Green (representing the money,
wealth and economics of oil); 2. Black (the
substance of oil and the physics of finding
and producing it); 3. Red, White and Blue
(origins of the American industry and the
ghost of Rockefeller); 4. Red (war, colonial-
ism and the access to oil); 5. Primary colors
(money, people and technology); 6. Colors of
the Rainbow (the dominance of culture in the
world of oil); 7. Yellow (the constructive and
destructive roles of government); 8. New
Green (the politics of environmentalism and
oil); 9. Purple (an industry for the third mil-
lennium). Each chapter opens with an inter-
esting story from the authors’ professional
life. And then the reader is given a dose of
technical information in a plain language.
The inclusion of 12 color illustrations by an
artist (Armando Izquierdo) has made the
book truly colorful.
The content of The Color of Oil was
originally published as monthly articles in
the Petroleum Engineer International (now
called Hart’s E&P). Although the technical
information is accurate, in some cases, the
authors’ writing is highly opinionated. For
example, environmentalists concerned about
the global warming as a result of fossil fuel
consumption will not find a balanced treat-
ment of this issue in the book.
Deffeyes’ book gives a lot more infor-
mation on petroleum geology and explo-
ration, from the evaluation of petroleum
source rock (chapter 2) through oil migration
in the reservoir rock and accumulation in the
trap (chapter 3) to finding oil (chapter 4).
Drilling methods are explained in chapter 5.
The next six chapters (a little less than half of
the book) are the “meat” of the book, so to
speak, in accordance with its title.
To understand Hubbert’s Peak we need
to know Hubbert the man. Who was Hub-
bert? In The Color of Oil he is introduced as
“one of the great names in petroleum engi-
neering (p. 33).” Maybe so. But M. King
Hubbert was not a petroleum engineer; he
was a geoscientist (geophysicist and struc-
tural geologist). The only article about the
biography of Hubbert cited in Deffeyes’
book (page 300, Doan, 1994) is unfortu-
nately incorrect (there is no such article in the
Geological Society of America Bulletin as
cited).
This year (2003) marks the 100th
i f H bb t’ bi th I 1956
Since the mid-1990s, several researchers
have attempted to use Hubbert’s methodol-
ogy to work out petroleum production curves
for the whole world. In such analysis, world
production volume is plotted against respec-
tive years, and assuming a total amount of
recoverable oil resources, the production
curve rises over the years, reaches a peak,
and then declines. This does not mean that
we will run out of oil soon after the peak; it,
however, implies that the production will
never rise again.
Deffeyes explains how Hubbert’s
method works and then uses it to reach the
conclusion given at the very beginning of the
book: “Global oil production will probably
reach a peak sometime during this decade.”
His prediction of the peak years (2004–2008)
is among the lowermost figures. Others have
suggested somewhat higher figures; for
example, 2030 estimated by the US Depart-
ment of Energy. Whatever the year we
choose, as far as we assume that recoverable
oil resources have a fixed volume, oil pro-
duction as well as oil consumption will
increase over the years, and sooner or later
we will hit the Hubbert’s Peak and the
decline thereafter.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that the
proponents of the view that we are going to
hit the Hubbert’s Peak soon are mostly petro-
leum geoscientists, from Hubbert himself
through Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere,
Buz Ivanhoe, Walter Youngquist to Kenneth
Deffeyes (who was Hubbert’s friend while
working for Shell in the 1960s.)
The authors of The Color of Oil, who
are petroleum engineers, do not envision a
soon-to-end oil resources or peak production.
Economides and Oligney write (pages
165–166): “A constant theme, from the very
infancy of the industry at the turn of the 19th
century, has been that the world is running
out of oil. … Part of the problem is the nat-
ural and understandable, but often wrong,
tendency to predict the future based on the
past—what one knows and how things
behaved previously. Further aggravating the
case for petroleum is the invisibility of the
resource, its highly capricious distribution,
its actual magnitude when it is discovered,
and the recovery factor assigned to it. … We
predict that the world will not run out of oil
for the next three centuries, at least.”
Th f t ti d b

achieved after the peak (after “the production
is brought on stream” to use the jargon) —
thanks to the secondary and tertiary recovery
techniques, or an initial underestimation of
the petroleum reserves or the area of the pro-
ducing field. Therefore, the Hubbert’s peak
is rarely symmetrical.
The truth about the near future of petro-
leum resources perhaps lies somewhere
between two facts: firstly, the Earth has finite
petroleum resources; secondly, the past may
be projected into the future but does not nec-
essarily predict it. The future is its only
judge. However, our contrasting ideas and
different approaches help us sharpen our per-
spective and plan wisely.
Non-technical writing on the heavily
loaded subject of petroleum is not easy. But
the authors of these books have written pas-
sionately about their work. I especially
enjoyed Deffeyes’ humorous language
explaining the topics through personal anec-
dotes. Overall, both these books give a posi-
tive perspective on the oil industry and
should be encouraging to the geoscience
researchers and students intending to enter
this industry. The books should also be
informative to geoscience teachers and men-
tors because the petroleum industry is one of
the (if not the) largest employers of geoscien-
tists in many countries. And even those who
envision a non-fossil fuel future will also find
some use in reading these books.
Rasoul Sorkhabi
Japan National Oil Corporation,
Technology Research Center
JAPAN
E-mail: rasoul@jnoc.go.jp
The Earth inside and out:
Some major contributions
to geology in the twentieth
century
Geological Society Special Publication,
No, 192
Edited by David Oldroyd
The Gelogical Society of London, 2002. Hard
back , 369 pages, £85.00 list price, ISBN 1-
86239-096-7.
In 1901, Karl Alfred von Zittel published
his History of Geology and Paleontology
to the end of the nineteenth century. He
surveyed the range of his subject in only
six chapters, named as cosmical, physio-
graphical, and dynamical geology, petrog-
raphy, palaeontology, and stratigraphy.
Almost as promptly, papers from the Inter-
ti l G l i l C i t bli h d
Society in its usual impeccable style.
While by no means a comprehensive his-
tory of twentieth century geology, this vol-
ume makes a notable contribution to map-
ping its pathways.
Including the editor’s introduction,
there are fifteen papers, eight of which
were presented at the symposium. The
authors — no doubt reflecting the distribu-
tion of earth science historians — are from
Australia (2 papers), Europe (8), and North
America (4). The volume is illustrated with
historic and modern diagrams, graphs, let-
ters, maps, many black and white pho-
tographs, and thin sections (a few in color).
The index successfully grapples with ideas
as well as names. The language is often
technical, and anyone reading outside their
speciality will find it helpful to have a
recent glossary of geology at hand.
A twentieth-century consciousness is
present from start, as the cover photograph
is a moon-walker’s view of earth, remind-
ing us how much our home planet is part of
the cosmos: this theme is represented by
one paper. Papers on magnetism and
oceanography perhaps reflect Zittel’s
physiography, while three plate tectonics
papers extend Zittel’s dynamical geology.
Four papers cover different aspects of
petrology, while one each represent pale-
ontology and stratigraphy. A paper pre-
sents mathematical geology as a major
twentieth century trend in manipulation of
all data, while a final paper discusses the
culture of geology, not explicitly recog-
nized by Zittel.
Editor Oldroyd notes “much more
geology has been done in the twentieth
century than in the whole of previous
human history,” and singles out trends
towards specialization, the “two cultures”
debate, and the explosion of information.
He cites Henry William Menard’s view
that geology was “somewhat moribund in
the first half of the twentieth century,” and
indeed a century later it becomes hard to
imagine the time when the ocean floors
were little known, or when major problems
of earth movement had been identified but
not explained. Hindsight reminds us that
the seeds of new growth were apparent.
Around 1900, biostratigraphy had become
hi ti t d t l di
51
Space is insufficient to discuss all the
papers, so (without implying criticism of
the others) to give the flavor of the volume
two historical and two biographical papers
have been selected for discussion.
Ursula Marvin scans the heavens to
show how meteorites and space travel have
documented geological periods no longer
visible on earth. Deftly juggling technicali-
ties of meteoritic minerals, biographical
vignettes, historical details, and the politics
of space, Marvin pulls together a coherent
story. Along the way she unravels of the
similarities between Martian landscape and
the Channeled Scablands of Washington
State, and shows how craters on the moon
led to reevaluation of asteroid impacts and
repeated “discoveries” of the Chixculub
crater. Lastly, she links our view of the
earth from space with the rise of environ-
mental consciousness (which in turn is
blamed by another author for reducing
funding for metamorphic studies).
By contrast, William Sarjeant looks
inward through the microscope to create a
history of palynology, here seen as the
study not just of pollen but of all the small
microfossils which survive treatment of
their matrix by strong acids. Earliest
researchers had located pollen, dinoflagel-
lates and other microfossils in many sedi-
ments and developed techniques to extract
them. It was not until the thirties that they
were found useful in stratigraphic correla-
tion, a process bedeviled by isolation of
workers, and arguments about classifica-
tion and nomenclature. After World War
II, important studies began around the
world. Sarjeant himself began his career in
the UK, at the University of Sheffield
where Leslie Moore focused the research
work of his department on the use of
spores in stratigraphical correlation. One
of his colleagues, Charles Downie, used
the same approach with dinoflagellates,
and Sarjeant soon related dinoflagellate
distribution to Jurassic ammonite zones.
He surveys pioneering efforts around the
world, discusses the development of tech-
niques, and the establishment of micropa-
leontology journals and organizations to
1970.
As Lyell’s uniformitarianism was a
unifying idea in the nineteenth century, so
Arthur Holmes’ work provided focus for
the twentieth. Central to the volume there-
fore is Cherry Lewis’s study of Arthur
Holmes’ unifying theory “from radioactiv-
ity to continental drift.” Holmes took a
degree in physics and made the first Ura-
nium/Lead age determination in 1911,
shifting the perceived age of the earth from
100 million years to thousands of millions.
Nine years later, the author of this brilliant
and important work was still earning only
£200 a year as a demonstrator at Imperial
C ll H t k iti ith
52

out a degree in geology and after 18
months of unemployment, he resumed his
research when he was invited to form a
new geology department at Durham Uni-
versity. The long time frame now available
and the emission of heat during radioactive
decay led Holmes to present in 1928 his
idea that convection currents in the mantle
could drive continental drift. But accep-
tance was slow, and Holmes — like Dar-
win hesitating over the inclusion of man in
The Origin — presented continental drift
only hypothetically in his 1944 Principles
of Physical Geology. He did not spell it out
until the 1965 second edition. Holmes
lived to receive Columbia’s Vetlesen
Prize, but not to see the University’s
decoding of sea-floor spreading.
This result came from Bruce Heezen
and Marie Tharp, and Cathy Barton
focuses her paper on the second of these.
There have been many women geologists
in the twentieth century, and their struggle
for acceptance is an important part of the
story of twentieth century geology. Tharp
accompanied her soil surveyor father in the
field as a child, but chose to study litera-
ture at university. A course in geology
brought Tharp into a program designed to
encourage women to study petroleum geology
during the war-time shortage of men. She
worked for oil companies and the US Geolog-
ical Survey, acquiring an MS in geology and a
BS in mathematics. In 1948, she moved to
Columbia, where Heezen was a graduate stu-
dent gathering ocean floor data, and did draft-
ing and computing for him for nearly thirty
years. Tharp providind an essential role in
planning cruises and plotting data; she was
repeatedly promoted but never had time to get
a Ph.D. As a woman, she was excluded from
research at sea until the mid-1960s, worked at
home because of shortage of space and con-
flict between Heezen and other scientists, and
eventually lost her position, continuing only
on short-term funding. She developed the
techniques for presenting deep-sea geological
data in graphic form. She identified the rift in
the mid-Atlantic ridge, predicted by other
researchers, and with Heezen related it to
earthquake epicenters. However, neither sup-
ported mobilist geological ideas, and it was
left to others to demonstrate sea-floor spread-
ing.
It would be unfair to pick holes in the
selection of authors and the balance of topics
without knowing what attempts were made to
fill gaps. However, the volume somewhat
favors the more physical parts of geology, and
a paper on vertebrate paleontology in particu-
lar would have been a useful addition. Illustra-
tion is very uneven; four papers have none,
while the biographical study of Norman
Bowen is illustrated by graphs but not a por-
trait. This lack is the more evident because
Sarjeant’s palynology paper comes to life
because it is copiously illustrated, often with
photographs of key figures by the author
(taken during conferences, field trips and vis-
its over several decades).
But these quibbles do not reflect on
the overall importance of this volume,
which should be available to everyone with
an interest in the history of twentieth cen-
tury geology.
David Spalding
1105 Ogden Rd., RR#1
Pender Island,
B.C. CANADA, V0N 2M1
Professional Affiliate,
Department of Geological Sciences,
University of Saskatchewan

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