Only 10% of Earthquake Energy Shakes the Ground. Here’s What the Rest Does.

In an MIT lab, a team of geophysicists created “lab quakes,” a series of miniature, controlled versions of real earthquakes to see where all that destructive energy actually goes and what it’s doing. If you think it all gets absorbed into the ground that it tears apart, or the man-made infrastructure that it crumbles, you’re wrong.

According to their study published in AGU Advances, only about 10 percent of an earthquake’s energy actually causes the shaking that sends us diving under desks and door frames. The majority of it, somewhere between 68 percent and 98 percent, just cooks the surrounding rock, generating heat at the fault line. Less than 1 percent is spent on the dramatic stuff like fracturing rock and creating new surfaces.

To figure this out, the researchers basically recreate