Breddin’s graph for tectonic regimes

A simple graphical method is proposed to infer the tectonic regime from a fault and slip data set. An abacus is overlaid on a plot of the rake versus strike of the data. This yields the horizontal principal stress directions and a constraint on the stress tensor aspect ratio, in a manner similar to Breddin’s graph for two-dimensional strain analysis. The main requirement is that one of the principal stress directions is close to the vertical. This method is illustrated on monophase synthetic and natural data, but is also expected to help sort out multiphase data sets.