“…In an effort to better understand earthquake mechanisms, several deep drilling projects have been undertaken to retrieve material from seismically active zones of major faults, such as the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) for the San Andreas fault in California (Zoback et al, 2011), the Nojima fault in Japan (Ohtani et al, 2000), the Taiwan Chelungpu-Fault Drilling Project (Ma et al, 2006), the Deep Fault Drilling Project for the Alpine fault in New Zealand (Townend et al, 2009), the Wenchuan earthquake Fault Scientific Drilling Project in China (Xue et al, 2013), and the Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project for the plate boundary thrust off the coast of Japan (Chester et al, 2013). Material retrieved from drill cores can be studied in the laboratory and thus provides direct information about physical and chemical processes that occur at depth within a seismically active zone.…”