here’s an interesting publicy available summary of a new paper (today) that discusses how our views of fault zone properties are changing. kelin wang (and others) have discussed this before (theory and model), but now we have a large earthquake (tohoku-oki 2011) that did what we expected (previously unexpected) given wang’s (and others) ideas; the fault ruptured all the way to the trench, or all the way to the surface of the sea floor (we used to think the fault would not rupture in the sediments, but we were thinking in a static manner). it is all about the dynamic frictional properties of sediments (velocity strengthening vs velocity weakening). they have a paper in nature if you have access to that….
Here is a summary of the paper
here is a link to the nature paper