Kazuo Mizoguchi

TL;DR: It seems that faults are lubricated during earthquakes, irrespective of the fault rock composition and of the specific weakening mechanism involved, according to a large set of published and unpublished experiments.

TL;DR: In this article, high-velocity friction experiments on a fault gouge collected from the Nojima fault activated during the 1995 Kobe earthquake showed that the friction coefficient decreased from 0.63 to 0.18 over a slip weakening distance, at high slip rates of ∼ 1 m/s.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined two effects of the presence of clay in brittle deformations: the reduction in frictional strength and the impediment of across-fault fluid flow, and they showed that the decrease in the friction coefficient of a gouge with increasing clay content was not simple, but showed a sharp drop at 50 vol.% clay content.

TL;DR: In this article, rotary-shear experiments were conducted at seismic slip rates (equivalent to 0.9 and 1.3 m/s) at 0.6 MPa normal stress on a natural clayey gouge for saturated and non-saturated initial conditions.

TL;DR: In this paper, high-velocity experiments on fault gouge taken from the Nojima fault that slipped during the 1995 Kobe earthquake were conducted to investigate physical mechanism associated with the slip-weakening behavior.