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Oh, rock on! (Lulz, I made a pun by mistake.)
Yeah, I never thought we could do it at a super large scale since the forces required are too massive. However, I find it funny that we actually do bend rocks, for whatever reason.
The elephant in the room is why? Based on what you described, it seems like a very specific problem that is expensive to solve and happens to be dynamic enough to merit repeated testing.
I am gonna make a wild guess for fun though....
I am guessing the reason it's done has something to do with mining and trying to solve material density problems. If I needed to drill through a few layers of rock and I knew the material types, sticking samples of those materials in a press that simulates tectonic activity would give me a good idea what I was dealing with. That data seems like it would be key in setting feeds and speeds for expensive drills...
This is definitely part of it. Oil companies have labs that run samples all day every day to study the density and porosity of rocks to see how much oil or gas they could hold when they're trying to find new areas to drill.
Most of what I'm familiar with is research labs at universities where they are studying it to simulate tiny earthquakes. It's just pure research to learn more about how the earth functions as a system. All rocks are different and all situations are different so the more data you collect the more you can understand exactly what happened during an earthquake and why. Maybe it can lead to better earthquake prediction or it can let us use those earthquakes to know more about the structure of the earth.
What a kick-ass resume bullet:
Sr. Rock Bender (Nov 2019 - Current)