When the crust breaks, it develops ruptures, and rock masses are displaced along these faults. Where exactly and how faulting will occur depends to a large extent on the nature of the stresses.

Normal faults show cracks where one block of rock is sliding down and away from another block of rock. These faults usually occur in areas where the crust is very slowly stretching or where two plates ...

The Denali Fault is a strike-slip fault, a place where two chunks of continental crust slide past each other. On Nov. 3, 2002, the fault jolted, creating a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that knocked ...

They hypothesized that melting glaciers might alter the stresses on faults, potentially accelerating earthquakes in the short term by reducing the load on the crust. Computers can model this ...

These are known as Transform Faults. As the plates scrape past each other, pressure builds up and is released suddenly, causing an earthquake. The plates of the Earth's crust are constantly moving ...

These are both “strike-slip faults”, which means they accommodate ... be many smaller earthquakes known as aftershocks as the crust readjusts to the changes in stress. These can continue ...

A magnitude 2.8 earthquake rattled the Short Pump area northwest of Richmond on Tuesday evening, with people as far away as Fairfax County reporting they felt it, too, according to the U.S. Geological ...