Brittle materials loaded under compression generally fail by shear faulting. This paper addresses the initiation of the fault. It presents direct observational evidence from ice, which is used as a model material for rock, and shows that wing cracking and splay cracking are important processes in the localization of deformation, both prior to and during fault initiation. Wing cracks develop at the tips of sliding intergranular cracks and tend to align with the maximum principal stress. Splay cracks emanate from one side of the sliding parent crack. The theme of the paper is that the splay cracks play the dominant role in triggering the fault. The central idea is that the slender columns between the splay cracks are more likely to buckle and fail than are the columns between adjacent wing cracks because they do not have two fixed ends; instead, the end stemming from the inclined parent crack is free. A moment is then applied by frictional sliding of the parent inclined crack, and this causes the fixed-free columns to break at a much lower stress than the fixed-fixed columns. Columns created near a free surface are more likely to fail than those created elsewhere, and this explains the observation that shear localization tends to initiate near free surfaces. A first-order calculation shows that the failure stress of the splay-created columns is of the same order of magnitude as the terminal failure stress. ¿ 1999 American Geophysical Union