Earthquakes can cause cracks that propagate quickly Shutterstock/nagew1977
Thin strips of a transparent gel have been found to crack impossibly quickly.
“What we found was a total surprise. This just isn’t supposed to happen,” says Jay Fineberg at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who led the team that observed the record-breaking cracks. The finding could improve our understanding of some earthquakes and how brittle materials break.
The researchers used fast high-resolution cameras to record how cracks spread through thin samples of porous gels that are commonly used for…
