Abstract
The slow crawl of the Earth's tectonic plates is periodically punctuated by the release of decades or centuries of accumulated stress. Standard earthquakes, lasting from fractions of a second to minutes in duration, are known to range from imperceptible to those that can flatten a city, but recent geodetic measurements have led to the discovery of a previously unrecognized style of fault slip—episodic slow earthquakes. These slow earthquakes recur roughly annually, involve a weeklong or monthlong speeding up of a plate's motion by a factor of 10—100, and are associated with low‐level seismic tremors. First detected about 10 years ago in Japan and western North America, they occur along the same faults that produce devastating magnitude 9 earthquakes but at greater depths. How and why slow earthquakes differ from regular earthquakes, and the extent to which they might foreshadow the shallower truly great earthquakes, are currently topics of wide interest. (Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, doi:10.1029/2010GC003386, 2011)
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