Thursday, January 27, 2011

Map with Plate Boundaries, Shearing, Compression, Tension and Location of Major Faults Lines

So a quick introduction to all of these aspects of the earth's movement:
Shearing= Stress that pushes a mass of rock in the opposite direction. It can cause the rock to break and slip apart or change it's shape.
Compression= The stress force called compression squeezes rock until it folds or breaks. One plate pushing against another is compression.
Tensions= The stress force called tension pulls on the crust stretching it so it becomes thinner in the middle. Tension is when two plates move apart.
Fault Lines= Usually occur along plate boundaries (where 2 plates meet) it is when the rock cracks due to stress.
So what I found is that in places of Compression and Shearing a lot of Major Fault lines were located but not so much in places with tension, which is something I found slightly odd. Some of the location with Major Fault lines are:
Turkey- North Anatolian Fault/East Anatolian Fault
Chile - Liquine-Ofqui Fault
New Zealand to Indonesia- Macquarie Fault Zone
Pakistan and Afghanistan- Charman Fault
California- San Jacinto Fault Zone/ Calaveras Fault
Guatemala- Chixoy-Polochic Fault/ Motagua Fault
Japan- Itoigawa- Shizuoka
All these places are marked in orange, and as you can see on the map, the places that are marked in orange are mostly along plate boundaries and on earthquake regions, which is pretty non-surprising that there are major fault lines there. Also in green I circled the top 3 places that that have had major earthquakes since 1990, these include Kangra, India- 8.6, San Fransisco-7.8, Messina, Italy- 7.5.
<--- This is the map of Earthquakes

1 comment:

  1. Excellent interpretation. Yeah, it is really weird that at areas of tension, or diverging plates, there aren't a lot of faults occurring. I am glad that you included the Earthquake occurrences since 1990 as well as the map. Perhaps the map could have been retaken because it is blurry. Great job!

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