If the hanging wall drops relative to the footwall, you have a normal fault. Normal faults occur in areas undergoing extension (stretching). If you imagine undoing the motion of a normal fault, you will undo the stretching and thus shorten the horizontal distance between two points on either side of the fault.

There are three kinds of faults: strike-slip, normal and thrust (reverse) faults, said Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

In a reverse fault, the hanging wall displaces upward, while in a normal fault the hanging wall displaces downward. Distinguishing between these two fault types is important for determining the stress regime of the fault movement.

Reverse faults are exactly the opposite of normal faults. If the hanging wall rises relative to the footwall, you have a reverse fault. Reverse faults occur in areas undergoing compression (squishing).

What land form is produced by tension? The three landforms produced by compression are the central Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania, the Himalayas in Asia, and the Alps in Europe.

landforms created by plate motion but these massive, slow-moving plates have so much force they can build tall mountains, form deep valleys, and rip earth’s surface apart. compression, tension, shear stresses are at work at plate boundaries.

In geology, shear is the response of a rock to deformation usually by compressive stress and forms particular textures. The process of shearing occurs within brittle, brittle-ductile, and ductile rocks. Within purely brittle rocks, compressive stress results in fracturing and simple faulting.

transform boundaries

shear

A prime example of tensional stress is the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the plates carrying North and South America are moving west, while the plates carrying Africa and Eurasia are moving east. Tensional stress can also occur well within an existing plate, if an existing plate begins to split itself into two pieces.