Stress around the world

Today in class we had to highlight specific plates on earth where the tectonic plates make certain kinds of stress. I used pink for compression, yellow for tension, and orange for shearing. We were somewhat predicting the paths of the plates and what areas will be hit when the plates collide. All of our maps are slightly different and we all interpenetrated the map in different ways. While working on this I noticed that there were mainly tension quakes across the world. Tension is when the stress force pulls at the rock and makes it weaker in the middle. It occurs when two plates are moving apart. Tension quakes mostly occurred on the ocean or near the coast line. The next most popular type of stress was compression. Compression occurs when the plates squeeze the rocks until it folds or breaks. Compression quakes occurred mainly on the coast line of the pacific and Indian ocean. Although this wasn't the most common type of stress, using other research I discovered that it made the most powerful quakes. The type of stress that occurs the least was shearing. Shearing is when the plates push rocks in two separate directions. Shearing quakes occurred mainly in the ocean and on the coast line of North America. It was really cool to see what types of quakes occurred where. I know now that the type of stress I would have been feeling in Seattle would have been shearing and the kind I would feel in Serbia or Switzerland would be compression. Tracking quakes was really fun and I can imagine it would be a pretty interesting job.