World Stress Map Database Release 2016

The World Stress Map (WSM) database is a global compilation of information on the crustal present-day stress field. It is a collaborative project between academia and industry that aims to characterize the stress pattern and to understand the stress sources. It commenced in 1986 as a project of the International Lithosphere Program under the leadership of Mary-Lou Zoback. From 1995-2008 it was a project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities headed first by Karl Fuchs and then by Friedemann Wenzel. Since 2009 the WSM is maintained at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and since 2012 the WSM is a member of the ICSU World Data System. All stress information is analysed and compiled in a standardized format and quality-ranked for reliability and comparability on a global scale. The WSM database release 2016 contains 42,870 data records within the upper 40 km of the Earth’s crust. The data are provided in three formats: Excel-file (wsm2016.xlsx), comma separated fields (wsm2016.csv) and with a zipped google Earth input file (wsm2016_google.zip). Data records with reliable A-C quality are displayed in the World Stress Map (doi:10.5880/WSM.2016.002). Further detailed information on the WSM quality ranking scheme, guidelines for the various stress indicators, and software for stress map generation and the stress pattern analysis is available at www.world-stress-map.org. VERSION HISTORY:Version 1.1. (15 June 2019): updated version of the zip-compressed Google Earth .kml (wsm2016_google.zip) with a new URL of the server.