Robert Herrendörfer

TS Tectonics and Structural Geology

The 2016 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Robert Herrendörfer for the poster/PICO entitled:

Spontaneous aseismic and seismic slip on evolving faults in a continuum-mechanics framework (Herrendörfer, R.; van Dinther, Y.; Gerya, T.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Robert Herrendörfer is a PhD student at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Taras Gerya and Dr. Ylona van Dinther. In his PhD project, which is funded by SNSF grant 200021-153524, he applies and further develops a numerical method to better understand the interaction between earthquakes and subduction zone dynamics. The EGU 2016 poster presents the implementation of rate-and state friction and adaptive time-stepping into a continuum mechanics modelling approach, which was originally designed for long-term and large-scale geodynamic simulations. It demonstrates that the further developed model, combined with permanent strain-weakening as a parametrisation of the brittle faulting process, has the potential to enhance our understanding of seismic and aseismic slip transients with respect to evolving faults.