Class organizational meeting: Monday, Sept. 25, 2000, 2 p.m., 162a South Mudd.

Instructors: T. Ahrens, tja@gps.caltech.edu; J. Stock, jstock@gps.caltech.edu.

Teaching Assistant: to be assigned.

The following information was for the fall 1997 class. This will be updated closer to the start of Fall quarter 2000.

Course grading: 60% problem sets, 40% final exam.

Course Topics.

1. Stress and strain tensorial analysis. Rotation of coordinate systems. Principal stresses and strains. Hooke's Law and elastic moduli. One-dimensional stress, strain, biaxial stress. Biot's equations for poroelasticity.

2. Deformation maps. Linear elastic fracture mechanics. Damage and micro tensile failure: micro-crack distribution. Shear failure - Byerlee's law. Mohr-Coulomb failure and rock friction. Dislocation creep, plasticity and viscosity. Power law creep and diffusion flow.

3. Thermal regime of Earth. Heat flow measurement. Theories: thermal conductivity - phonon and photons. Onset of Rayleigh-Benard flow. Thermal structure of Earth.

4. In-situ stress in Earth - relation to plate tectonics, glacial and volcanic loading, lithospheric flexure. Field measurement of in-situ stress- stress concentrations around boreholes.

5. Mechanics of faulting. Stress trajectories. Stress orientation and fault plane solutions. Stress drops from earthquakes.

6. Shock wave generation from spherical and planar sources. Hugoniots, release isentropes, shock temperature. Shock wave equations of state. Dynamic yielding. Phase changes. Dynamic tensile failure.

7. Impact mechanics. Partitioning of energy. Wave attenuation. Impact spall.

8. Equation of state (EOS) of Earth materials. Systematics: Birch's law, Anderson's seismic equation of state, Debye and Gruneisen's EOS. Applications to Earth.

Supplementary reading:

T. Engelder - Stress REgimes in the Lithosphere; Princeton Univ. Press, 1993.

Y. Gueguen and V. Palciauskas - The Physics of Rocks; Princeton Univ. Press., 1994.

J. Melosh - Impact cratering: A Geologic Process; Oxford Univ. Press., 1989.

J.-P. Poirier - Introduction to the Physics of the Earth's Interior; Cambridge Univ. Press., 1991.

C. Scholz - The Mechanics of Earthquakes and Faulting; Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.

O. Anderson - Equations of State for Solids in Geophysics and Ceramic Science; Oxford University Press, 1995.

D. L. Anderson - Theory of the Earth; Blackwell Scientific, 1989.

J. C. Jaeger and N. W. C. Cook - Fundamentals of Rock Mechanics; Chapman and Hall, 1976.

G. Ranalli - Rheology of the Earth; Chapman and Hall, 1995.

G. V. Middleton and P. R. Wilcock - Mechanics in the Earth and Environmental Sciences; Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Last updated July 13, 2000.