All Aligned on the Western Front of North America? Analyzing the Stress Field in the Northern Cordillera
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study presents the first rigorous statistical analysis of the present‐day crustal stress along the western margin of the North American Plate, covering the entire Canadian Cordillera and Alaska. Using circular statistics and geometric tests, we develop a regional stress province model that constrains the directions of first‐order stresses. Observed stresses from the World Stress Map database and other published sources are compared with modeled directions derived from plate boundary stresses, mantle drag, and gravitation‐induced body forces. Our results show that plate boundary forces dominate the stress field, particularly those associated with the convergent and transform boundaries between the Pacific/Yakutat and North American plates. Local stress modifications are caused by slip partitioning related to oblique plate boundary geometries. Active regions at the northeastern edge of the Cordillera coincide with the superposition of stresses from both the Pacific–North American transform boundary and the Arctic/North Atlantic ridge push. Despite their large distance from active plate boundaries, the alignment of stress trajectories in the Richardson Mountains and Mackenzie Mountains results in stress amplification and eventually deformation. Conversely, misalignment and hence stress reduction explains the seismic quiescence in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Thereby, the lithospheric‐scale structural inheritance along the Tintina Fault and the northern Rocky Mountain Trench acts a major deflector of far‐field stresses. Second‐order drivers, notably gravitation‐induced body forces, further modify stress fields, particularly along the northern slope of the Brooks Range and within the North American foreland of the Cascadia subduction zone.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".