Defining the Structure of the Earthquake Fault by Geophysical Logging and Coring

For millennia, scientists have been asking questions about the physics of earthquakes in the hope that their catastrophic effects can be mitigated. Further progress is largely hampered by a lack of fundamental data. By drilling an unprecedented 856 m below the sea floor in 6912 m water depth, scientists have directly sampled the geology and geophysics of the fault that caused the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, helping them answer fundamental questions of the nature of the slip zone.