Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2015 Apr 21;6:6728. doi: 10.1038/ncomms7728

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

Copyright © 2015, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

PMC Copyright notice

Several natural and anthropogenic (man-made) factors can influence the subsurface stress regime resulting in earthquakes. Natural stress changes that promote earthquakes include intraplate stress changes related to plate tectonics9,10 and natural water table or lake levels variations caused by changing weather patterns or water drainage patterns with time, and in some instances (not pictured) the advance or retreat of glaciers. Anthropogenic stress changes that promote earthquakes include human-generated changes to the water table (including dam construction2,3) and industrial activities involving the injection or removal of fluids from the subsurface4. The figure is not to scale.