The World Stress Map Project – an ILP success story

Abstract

The World Stress Map (WSM) Project was initiated in 1986 under the auspices of the International Lithosphere Program. Focus of the first WSM phase was to characterize the intraplate stress field pattern and to publish an open access database of the contemporary crustal stress information. In 1992 the final project results were published in a special volume of the Journal of Geophysical Research [Zoback 1992] with the scientific results based on the WSM database with over 7300 data records. The key finding of the first phase is that for a number of major tectonic plates the orientation of the maximum horizontal stress SHmax is sub-parallel to absolute plate motion. The second phase of the WSM project lasted from 1996 until 2008 as a project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, located at the Geophysical Institute, Karlsruhe University. At the end of this phase the WSM database has increased to 21,750 data records. With this compilation regional and local deviations from the first-order plate-wide trend were identified and published in a special issue of Tectonophysics [Heidbach et al. 2010]. Since 2009 the WSM project is located at the GFZ Potsdam and a new database release is in preparation for the 30th anniversary of the WSM project in 2016. We present preliminary results of the new database release and two examples that show the practical use the WSM for the calibration of 3D geomechanical-numerical models; one represents a large scale model of the entire Alberta basin in Canada and the other is of smaller scale simulating the 3D in situ stress state of a potential waste disposal site in northern Switzerland.