World stress map published

Abstract

The World Stress Map (WSM), published in April 2007 by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, displays the tectonic regime and the orientation of the contemporary maximum horizontal compressional stress at more than 12,000 locations within the Earth's crust. The Mercator projection is a scale of 1:46,000,000.The WSM provides insight into large‐scale patterns of stress orientations (i.e., first‐order stress patterns due to plate boundary forces and second‐order stress patterns due to topography), large lateral density variations, and deglaciation effects. Furthermore, the WSM contains a number of regions with high data resolution that enable users to investigate variations in stress orientations on local scales and to discuss factors controlling third‐order stress patterns such as active faults, local inclusions, detachment horizons, and density contrasts. Forces resulting from these geological subsurface structures control the stress field orientations especially when magnitudes of the horizontal stresses are close to each other.