Research News

Earthquakes occur every day. A damaging earthquake occurs every month and/or every year. It can suddenly release a large to extremely large amount of kinetic energy within a few tens to two hundreds seconds and over ten to hundreds kilometer distances in the Earth's crust and on ground surface. It can also generate seismic waves that can be received globally and co-seismic ground damages such as co-seismic ruptures and landslides. However, such vast, dramatic, rapid and devastating kinetic actions over large regions of the Earth's crustal rocks and the ground soils cannot be known or predicted by people at few years, few weeks, few days, few hours, and/or few minutes before they are happening, even though many well educated and trained professionals in geoscience and geoengineering have made tremendous efforts in studying earthquakes and predicting damaging earthquakes over the past one hundred years. Due to numerous failure cases in earthquake prediction, geo-professionals have reached a consensus that the next damaging earthquake cannot be predicted.

To solve the difficulties, Professor Quentin Yue hypothesizes that highly compressed methane gas is the cause of earthquakes. It can be illustrated with the above figure. The methane gas generated in the hot mantle and core has to migrate and flow upward and accumulate beneath and in the lower crust according to the second law of thermo-dynamics, where the lower crustal rock is in high compression and can form the impermeable trap. The mass of highly compressed and dense methane gas can be accumulated and stored in deep fault zones. With time, the mass M(t) and the pressure P(t) of the dense gas in the deep fault zone can be increased gradually while its volume V(t) has to be constrained and confined by the high compressive stresses and high rigidity of the surrounding rocks in deep crust. The gradual increase of the mass M(t) and pressure P(t) (300 to 500 MPa) in the trap can expand and break the stress equilibrium and suddenly rupture the highly compressed geological fault.  A part of the high compressed and dense gas mass (DM(0), DV(0) and P(0)) can escape the gas trap and can forcefully expand and flow with a speed of 1 to 3 km/s in the originally closed fault and make the movement of the faults and surrounding rocks.  Therefore, Professor Yue trusts that the next damaging earthquakes can be predicted using his hypothesis.

References

1. Yue, Z.Q. (2014). On cause hypotheses of earthquakes with external tectonic plate and/or internal dense gas loadings, Acta Mechnica, 225, 1447–1469, DOI 0.1007/s00707-013-1072-2.