Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don’t have the room to shatter so they must bend.
Have we been able to do the same in a lab and would it have any commercial use? Bending a random bit of hard rock would be an interesting novelty, for sure.
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.