“While previous attempts to quantify the effect of chemomechanical weakening in engineered materials have relied on complex molecular dynamics models requiring significant computational resources, our work instead emphasizes the bridge between laboratory experiments and real-world phenomena like earthquakes,” says study lead Jordan Sickle, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US.

“Muscovite was chosen for this study mainly because of this material’s extreme flatness,” says Karin Dahmen, a professor at Illinois. “Each of its flaky layers is flat down to the atomic level. Because of this flatness, the interaction between the surface of this material and its environment is especially important.”