James R. Rice
Harvard University
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Primary Section: 16, Geophysics Secondary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1981)
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Research Interests
Theoretical mechanics in the geological sciences, geotechnology and materials physics, including earthquake source processes, fault and crack dynamics, lithospheric stressing and seismicity, hydrologic processes, and pore fluid interaction with earth materials. Rice addresses problems of stressing, deformation, fracture and flow as they arise in in seismology and tectonophysics and in civil/environmental and mechanical engineering and materials physics. His earthquake studies are on the mechanics and physics of fault zone processes, including the nucleation of seismic rupture, dynamic slip propagation, rupture through branched fault systems, factors controlling earthquake populations along faults, and relations among stressing, seismicity and deformation in or near continental and subduction fault systems. In studies of hydrologic processes, he addresses poroelastic effects and other pore fluid interactions in the deformation and failure of earth materials, with applications in seismology and environmental geomechanics. Previously his work has addressed the theory of crack propagation, especially in elastic-plastic metals, path-independent integrals in elasticity, the structure of inelastic constitutive relations, microscopic mechanisms of cleavage and ductile or creep rupture, the thermodynamics of interfacial embrittlement, wave effects in tensile crack dynamics, sliding friction and its instabilities, deformation localization into shear zones, and landslides in overconsolidated soil slopes. He has also contributed to techniques of computational mechanics, including finite-element and spectral elastodynamic methods.
