Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent articles by AGU journal editors.
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Faults can occur suddenly as earthquakes, but also slowly and still vigorously as slow-slip events. Slow slip events are observed in subduction zones where powerful megathrust earthquakes occur, but how these slow movements are generated remains to be a matter of debate.
Ozawa et al. [2024] present a novel view of the generation of slow slip events from the perspective of the so-called “failure valve mechanism”, by which cyclic changes in fluid pressure in fault zones promote slow movements even when faults are considered frictionally stable. The authors provide elegant analytical solutions and numerical simulations of the conditions under which slow slip events occur, in addition to make predictions about their propagation speed and frequency of occurrence. The mechanism predicts that such fluid-induced slow slip events should move along the fault in the direction of fluid flow.
Although this recent mechanism stays to be tested using geophysical data, it has great potential to explain the ubiquitous occurrence of slow slip phenomena in global subduction zones.
Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
—Yihe Huang, deputy editor,
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