Dr. Matt Ikari

My re­search group is fun­ded bya European Research CouncilStart­ing Grant, pro­jectPREDATORS(Plate-rate exper­i­mental deform­a­tion: Aseis­mic, tran­si­ent or seis­mic fault slip).

 We use labor­at­ory de­form­a­tion ex­per­i­ments to un­der­stand the nature of fault slip, spe­cific­ally why stable aseis­mic creep, de­struct­ive large mag­nitude earth­quakes, or in­ter­me­di­ate slow slip events oc­cur.  We com­bine our mech­an­ical data with other tech­niques, such as mi­cro­struc­tural and com­pos­i­tional ob­ser­va­tions, for a more com­plete pic­ture.  We make heavy use of In­ter­na­tional Ocean Dis­cov­ery Pro­gram (IODP) and In­ter­na­tional Con­tin­ental sci­entific Drilling Pro­gram (ICDP) samples from nat­ural faults; ex­amples in­clude the Nankai Trough and To­hoku (Ja­pan), Costa Rica, Cas­ca­dia, and Hikur­angi sub­duc­tion zones, as well as the San An­dreas Fault (Cali­for­nia) and Alpine Fault (New Zea­l­and).

For more in­form­a­tion on our work­ing group and the PRED­AT­ORS pro­ject:Experimental Geomechanics

Research Interests:Fault mechanics, earthquake generation, frictional properties of rock and sediment, subduction zone processes, fault-fluid interactions, slow earthquakes, submarine landslides

Expeditions:IODP Expedition 343, Japan Trench (2012), RV Sonne Expedition SO222, Nankai Trough (2012), IODP Expedition 322, Nankai Trough (2009)

Selected Recent Publications:
Ikari, M.J., A.J. Kopf (2017), Seis­mic po­ten­tial of weak, near-sur­face faults re­vealed at plate tec­tonic slip rates, Sci­ence Ad­vances 3, e1701269, doi :10.1126/​sciad­v1701269.
Ikari, M.J., Y. Ito, K. Ujiie and A.J. Kopf (2015), Spec­trum of slip be­ha­vior in To­hoku fault zone samples at plate tec­tonic slip rates, Nature Geoscience 8, doi :10.1038/​NGEO2547.
Ikari, M.J. (2015), Prin­cipal slip zones : Pre­curs­ors, but not re­cord­ers of earth­quake slip, Geo­logy 43, 955-958, doi :10.1130/​G37028.1.