Inhaltsbereich
WSM
World Stress Map project
The World Stress Map (WSM) is the global compilation of information on the present-day stress field of the Earth's crust with 21,750 stress data records in its current WSM database release 2008. It is a collaborative project between academia, industry and government that aims to characterize the stress patterns and to understand the stress sources. The project commenced in 1986 as a part of the International Lithosphere Program, under the leadership of Mary Lou Zoback. From 1995-2008, the WSM was a project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2009 the project is maintained and further developed at the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.
- This global stress map displays the present-day orientation of maximum horizontal stress from more than 11,000 data records with A-C quality of the WSM database release 2008 that are not flagged as so-called Possible Plate Boundary Events (PBE). Red indicates Normal Faulting (NF), green indicates Strike-Slip (SS), blue indicates Thrust Faulting (TF) and "U" is an unknown tectonic regime. Black lines are the major plate boundaries.
All stress information is recorded in a standardized format and quality-ranked for reliability and comparability on a global scale. The global stress map above displays the present-day orientation of maximum horizontal stress in the upper 40 km of the Earth’s crust from the WSM database release 2008. Focal mechanism solutions determined as being potentially unreliable (labeled as Possible Plate Boundary Events in the database) are not displayed. Further detailed information on the quality ranking, guidelines for various stress indicator, and software for stress map generation can be found on the WSM website at www.world-stress-map.org.