Abstract
A layman may laugh at you when you say that a rock feels the pinch of a force imposed on it! Yes, it does feel irrespective of the amount of force. In fact, the rock gets disturbed when a force is imposed upon it. The disturbance thus developed in a rock is called stress which is expressed as the force acting per unit area of a rock. If the applied stress persists uniformly till its amount exceeds the strength of the rock, the latter undergoes deformation, thus developing strain. Depending upon the specific conditions in the earth’s crust, stress can be of various types such as hydrostatic stress, differential stress, deviatoric stress and lithostatic stress. The stress that is locked in the rocks when they were formed in the geological past is called palaeostress that has implications for the amount of deformation (strain) in rocks as well as for the directions in which the stresses had acted upon the rocks. Precise knowledge of the present-day state of stress inside the earth’s surface is important in geology and in engineering geology, especially for various engineering and mining projects as well as for our preparedness for earthquakes. This chapter highlights some aspects of stress as relevant to structural geology.
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Bhattacharya, A.R. (2022). Stress. In: Structural Geology. Springer Textbooks in Earth Sciences, Geography and Environment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80795-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80795-5_3
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