Material scientists can now use information from a common mineral and well-known earthquake and avalanche statistics to figure out how harsh environmental conditions might affect the breakdown and failure of materials used in high-tech solar panels, geological carbon sequestration and infrastructure like roads, bridges and buildings.

The new study, led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in conjunction with Sandia National Laboratories and Bucknell University, demonstrates that the amount of deformation caused by stress applied locally to the surface of muscovite mica is controlled by the mineral's physical condition and follows the same statistical dynamics observed in earthquakes and landslides.

Scientists consider how a material's surface will interact with its surroundings before choosing it for engineering purposes. Geologists also aim to understand how chemo-mechanical weakening — chemical interactions between minerals and groundwater along faults — may steadily weaken rocks and cause sudden mechanical collapse.

"While previous attempts to quantify the effect of chemomechanical weakening in engineered materials have relied on complex molecular dynamics models requiring significant computational resources, our work instead emphasizes the bridge between laboratory experiments and real-world phenomena like earthquakes," said graduate student Jordan Sickle, who led the study with Illinois physics professor Karin Da.

"Muscovite was chosen for this study mainly because of this material's extreme flatness," he stated. "Each flaky layer is atomically flat. This flatness makes the material's surface-environment interaction crucial."

The work is published in Nature Communications.