Recent research has focused on the application of CTOA in predicting crack growth and arrest in ductile materials, especially in the context of high-grade pipelines used for gas transmission.
In fact, such a variation of indentation hardness occurs for most ductile and brittle materials even if there is no cracking around indentations. Sometimes this behaviour is referred to as ...
"Also, the principles of ductile deformation during hot collisions and self-cracking due to differential cooling could be extended to the study of other rocky bodies, including asteroids." ...