2026-04-04T12:44:46Zhttp://doidb.wdc-terra.org/oaip/oai

oai:doidb.wdc-terra.org:86282026-02-04T12:50:34ZDOIDBDOIDB.WSM

false4DOIDB.WSM 10.5880/wsm.2026.001 Heidbach, Oliver Oliver Heidbach 0000-0001-8009-5422 GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany Rajabi, Mojtaba Mojtaba Rajabi 0000-0002-0114-3199 University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia GFZ Data Services 2026 World Stress Map crustal stress in situ stress tectonic stress crustal stress pattern geophysics tectonics Science Keywords > EARTH SCIENCE > SOLID EARTH > TECTONICS > PLATE TECTONICS > LITHOSPHERIC PLATE MOTION > PLATE MOTION DIRECTION Science Keywords > EARTH SCIENCE > SOLID EARTH > TECTONICS > PLATE TECTONICS > STRESS Science Keywords > EARTH SCIENCE SERVICES > DATA MANAGEMENT/DATA HANDLING > DATA ACCESS/RETRIEVAL Science Keywords > EARTH SCIENCE SERVICES > DATA MANAGEMENT/DATA HANDLING > DATA SEARCH Heidbach, Oliver GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany Dataset DOI of paper when available 10.5880/wsm.2019.002 10.5880/WSM.2025.001 10.2312/wsm.2019.002 10.48440/wsm.2025.001 CC BY 4.0 The World Stress Map (WSM) is the global compilation of information on the present-day stress field in the Earth's crust. The current WSM database release 2025 (Heidbach et al., 2025) has 100,842 data records, but the data are unevenly distributed and clustered. To analyse the wavelength of the crustal stress pattern of the orientation of maximum horizontal stress SHmax, we use so-called smoothed stress maps that show the mean SHmax orientation on regular grids. The mean SHmax orientation is estimated using the 77,365 A-C data records from the WSM database release 2025 in the Matlab® script stress2grid v.1.1 (Ziegler and Heidbach, 2019) which is based on the circular statistics of axial data. We use a search radius around the grid point and compute the mean SHmax orientation if at least five data records are within the search radius.

The significance of the results is further improved by the weighting of the input data by three different parameters. 1.) Data quality weighting with wQ=1/15 for A-, wQ=1/20 for B-, and wQ = 1/25 for C-quality data. 2.) Inverse distance weighting relative to the grid point. This is based on the assumption that the closer a data record is to a grid point, the more strongly the stress state at the grid point influences that data record. Consequently, the contribution of an individual data record to the SHmax orientation increases with decreasing distance to the grid point. 3.) Minimum distance threshold: Data records located very close to a grid point would be overrepresented by the distance weight. To avoid this, a minimum distance threshold is applied such that all data records within 10% of the search radius are assigned the same weighting coefficient. Using a fixed search radius effectively filters from the SHmax data records the wavelength defined by the chosen search radius and does not resolve rotations of SHmax at smaller spatial scales.

We provide 13 global datasets for SHmax calculated with search radii of 500 km, 250km, 100km, and 50 km. For the 500 km and 250 km search all four grids are used on 2°, 1°, 0.5°, and 0.2°. For the 100 km search radius the 1°, 0.5°, and 0.2° grids are used and for the 50 km search radius only the 0.5° and 0.2° grids are applied. Details on the format of the data files with the mean SHmax orientation are provided in the accompanying Readme file. Further details on the WSM database release 2025 are available in the WSM Technical Report 25-01 (Rajabi et al., 2025).