Christine McCarthy
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Earthquakes and ice sheet collapse are both hazards with severe consequences for society, and both are partly controlled by friction. In each case friction comes down to tiny points of contact where surfaces touch: rock against rock along a fault, or ice against rock at the base of an ice sheet.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
friction
contact dynamics
stick-slip
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Image directly how microscopic contacts between ice and a glass plate form, grow and change through cycles of shear, slip and healing, using total internal reflection imaging in a custom cryogenic biaxial apparatus.
- Record acoustic signals from sliding ice samples and relate them to the contact evolution seen in the images, to determine how slip nucleation, slow slip and fast slip appear in sensor data.
- Test how temperature, which shifts ice between brittle and ductile behavior across a range of homologous temperature, affects drag, melting and frictional stability, using machine learning analysis to extrapolate to faults and glaciers.
More about the research
How those contacts evolve as surfaces fail carries information useful for understanding future events and assessing hazards. In nature these buried interfaces cannot be observed; the most informative data come from sensors placed at the surface. This collaborative project across three institutions instead builds a laboratory system in which the sliding interface can be both watched and listened to.
Why it matters
Clearer knowledge of how frictional contacts nucleate, heal and slide could sharpen assessments of seismic hazard along faults and of how ice sheets slide over their beds. Linking what happens at the contact to the acoustic signals it produces may help researchers interpret surface sensor records from real faults and glaciers, informing hazard estimates for communities exposed to earthquakes and to ice sheet collapse.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gregory McLaskey
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether seismic wave properties change reliably before or after laboratory earthquakes on dry and fluid-saturated meter-scale faults, using active source seismic interrogation with strain, slip and seismic sensor arrays.
Carolyn Tewksbury-Christle
Fort Lewis College, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether slow slip and tremor are preferentially hosted by metasedimentary or meta-mafic rocks, using fieldwork, geochemistry, geochronology and microstructural analysis of three exhumed subduction complexes.
Folarin Kolawole
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether fault motion along the reactivating Davie Fracture Zone varies along its length because of inherited bends and offsets, or stays uniform through local rotations of the stress field.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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