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Congratulations to Associate Professor, Dmitry Garagash. Dr Garagashs' paper titled "Ubiquitous weakening of faults due to thermal pressurization," was published in the October 2015 edition of Nature Geoscience. The paper is on mechanisms underlying earthquakes:

Laboratory and field knowledge about earthquakes suggests that at high slip rates, faults can weaken significantly, aiding rupture. Although several candidate physical mechanisms that may explain such weakening have been propsed, which one(s) actually aids fault slip in nature remains unknown. the study by Dmitri Garagash and Robert Viesca, newly publisehd in Nature Geoscience, tackles this question by looking at characteristics of the energy dissipation during earthquake slip, as inferred from seismological observations, and comparing those with the predictions of elastodynamic modeling of the earthquake rupture. They find that one possible mechanism - the thermal pressurization of pore fliud by the rapid shear heating of fault gouge - is likely a widespread and prominent process for fault weakening that governs seismic  slip in a wide range of earthquake sizes: from microseismicity in mines and near boreholes to the great earthquakes on plate-bounding faults.