“…That fault zones may be porous and saturated at seismogenic depths has important implications for a host of issues related to the dynamics of faulting (e.g., Andrew, 2003;Brodsky and Kanamori, 2001;Lachenbruch, 1980;Mase and Smith, 1987;Sibson, 1973;Sleep and Blanpied, 1992;Wibberley and Shimamoto, 2005), the strength (or weakness) of faults (e.g., Lachenbruch and Sass, 1977;Mount and Suppe, 1987;Rice, 1992;Zoback et al, 1987), and the forces that move lithospheric plates (e.g., Bird, 1978). To obtain direct information on the pore pressure in fault zones, drilling into active faults has been attempted around the world in the past decades (San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, SAFOD, near Parkfield in Central California (Zoback et al, 2010), the Nojima Fault Zone Probe in Japan, the Chelungpu Fault Drilling Project in Taiwan (see Brodsky et al, 2010, for a summary of the Nojima and Chelungpu projects), and an ongoing project to drill into the New Zealand South Island Alpine Fault, Gorman, 2011).…”