I can still recall the claustrophobic feel of the lock zones, the no-nonsense equipment searches and the sounds and smell of men in captivity.
The shallow lake, an important source of drinking water for the region, would require "extensive dredging" and "would probably suffer from salt infiltration in the lock zones," write Huete-Pérez and co-author Axel Meyer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Modeling of deformation, when integrated with the imaging, elucidates the nature of the locked zone, the origin of the largest asperity, and the structural controls on interplate thrust processes.
However, the authors do not rule out that over time, the cumulative piling up of tremor and slow-slip events could gradually push the locked zone closer toward failure, potentially causing a large and damaging rupture.
In this simple model, interactions between the locked zone and the slow slip area are neglected.
The reflective zones we found are likely located at the down-dip end of the locked zone, where high slip deficit rates are currently observed.
But Dragert warns that the slow earthquakes might one day rupture the locked zone if it's close to a critical threshold.
This highly locked zone has been producing magnitude 7.5 to 8.0 earthquakes with the recurrence time of about 37 years (The Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, 2011).
In this area, ordinary earthquakes occur in a seismogenic zone, while slow slip events occur in the transition area between the shallow locked zone and the deeper unlocked zone.
In these two fault rupture models,the currently locked zone at Mentawai patch was divided into 348 fault subsets with each segment having a size of 20 km×20 km (Chlieh et al., 2008).
