Artificial peridotite takes its gold coat off
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Artificial peridotite takes its gold coat off

by Thomas P. Ferrand, Earthquake Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan

Photograph taken through a binocular during a critical step: extraction of artificial peridotite from its gold capsule.
The sample is a little cylinder, 3 mm long with a diameter of 2.1 mm, sintered from micrometric powders of San Carlos olivine and Corsica antigorite.
Such samples have been used to reproduce earthquakes in the laboratory using a D-DIA apparatus. Thanks to them, a new model has come to explain intermediate-depth earthquakes: the DDST, "Dehydration-Driven Stress Transfer".