The new World Stress Map database release 2025

The need to describe the present-day crustal stress state has been recognized from a wide range of geo-disciplines. Furthermore, meeting the climate goals will require an energy transition and the associated phase-out of fossil, leading to increased and modified subsurface utilisation concepts as well as new demands on the integrity and long-term stability of subsurface operations. Thus, crustal stress data and geomechanical models for continuous predictions of the stress field in larger rock volumes will become more important. Stress data were already collected in the 1930s using surface relief methods, followed by flat jack and borehole relief methods in the 1950s, and hydraulic fracturing in the 1970s. Another important source of stress information was established in the 1980s using interpretations of borehole breakouts as stress indicator and later also drilling induced tensile fractures. Furthermore, due to the expansion of global seismological networks in the past decades, the number of earthquake focal mechanisms , primarily used as stress indicators for the deeper part of the Earth crust, has increased significantly. These developments resulted in the initiation of the World Stress Map (WSM) project (http://world-stress-map.org) in 1986.

The backbone of the WSM is a quality ranking scheme allowing the comparison of various stress indicators which sample the rock stress on a wide range of spatial scales. The latest WSM database was released in 2016. For the new WSM release 2025 we developed the new database infrastructure MaRS (Management and Repository of Stress) based on PostgreSQL. It has a web-based interface to insert new data and assess these data automatically with internal Python routines, streamlining data submission significantly. The new WSM release entails the following key changes:

• The WSM release 2025 has more than doubled the number of data records.
• Addition of high-quality data records from more than 3,000 boreholes including a study that uses a uniquely high-resolution dataset in Eastern Australia (see poster EGU25-5042 of Rajabi et al.).
• Integration of the global focal mechanism catalogue of the International Seismological Centre (ISC).
• Replacement of the 40 km depth limit using instead the global crustal model of Szwillus et al. (2019, JGR) to assign if data records from earthquake focal mechanisms are located in the crust or not.
• Updated WSM quality assessment scheme to make criteria programmable.
• Introduction of the new quality class X with three sub-classes for data records with missing information (Xmi), stress indicator that are rarely used (Xru), and stress indicator that are not established (Xne).

Quo Vadis WSM? The new database infrastructure MaRS allows us for a frequent release schedule of the WSM database to promptly provide the community with new data. MaRS was also developed to include to expand the WSM database in the next years with quality-ranked stress magnitude and pore pressure data. Adding this information is essential for model calibration widening the scope of WSM applications.