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Fault (geology) Satellite image of a fault in the Taklamakan Desert. The two colorful ridges (at bottom left and top right) used to form a single continuous line, but have been split apart by movement along the fault. In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant ...
Types of faulting. Anderson's theory of faulting, devised by Ernest Masson Anderson in 1905, is a way of classifying geological faults by use of principal stress. [1] [2] A fault is a fracture in the surface of the Earth that occurs when rocks break under extreme stress. [3] Movement of rock along the fracture occurs in faults.
In geology, the term " tension " refers to a stress which stretches rocks in two opposite directions. The rocks become longer in a lateral direction and thinner in a vertical direction. One important result of tensile stress is jointing in rocks. However, tensile stress is rare because most subsurface stress is compressive, due to the weight of ...
v. t. e. In continuum mechanics, stress is a physical quantity that describes forces present during deformation. For example, an object being pulled apart, such as a stretched elastic band, is subject to tensile stress and may undergo elongation. An object being pushed together, such as a crumpled sponge, is subject to compressive stress and ...
Structural geology is the study of the three-dimensional distribution of rock units with respect to their deformational histories. The primary goal of structural geology is to use measurements of present-day rock geometries to uncover information about the history of deformation (strain) in the rocks, and ultimately, to understand the stress ...
Terminology. An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes may also be referred to as quakes, tremors, or temblors. The word tremor is also used for non-earthquake seismic rumbling.
Foliation in geology refers to repetitive layering in metamorphic rocks. [1] Each layer can be as thin as a sheet of paper, or over a meter in thickness. [1] The word comes from the Latin folium, meaning "leaf", and refers to the sheet-like planar structure. [1] It is caused by shearing forces (pressures pushing different sections of the rock ...
A transform fault or transform boundary, is a fault along a plate boundary where the motion is predominantly horizontal. [1] It ends abruptly where it connects to another plate boundary, either another transform, a spreading ridge, or a subduction zone. [2] A transform fault is a special case of a strike-slip fault that also forms a plate boundary.