Stress in Earth Dynamics

This is a picture of what we were doing in class today on plate boundaries and earthquakes. We labeled the stress, one color for each type of stress.
The yellow stands for compression, the pink stands for tension, and the orange stands for shearing. Tension is a force that pulls apart at the tectonic plates. It is caused by two plates moving apart. Compression is a force that causes the tectonic plates to squeeze together, causing them to either fold or break.It's caused by one plate pushing another. Shearing is a force that causes two masses of rock slip in opposite directions. This causes the rock to either break and slip apart or change shape. Some of the major fault lines were in the areas of compression. One big example is that area right by Haiti. This explains the several earthquakes (some major, some minor) experienced in that area of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and also Chile. As I found on SciLinks, there are also a lot of earthquakes in California. this is also an area of compression, and in some parts, tension.