In order to better understand the state of stress on faults, I’ve developed several finite element models in collaboration with Frédéric Herman (University of Lausanne). Stress levels correlate with viscous heat production, so the idea is to compare modeled temperature distributions to geologic constraints. Using supercomputers we’ve run around a million models using the Neighborhood Algorithm inversion scheme. This allows us to explore uncertainties in a systematic way. The figure above is from my 2013 Geology paper where we show that stress levels were low on California’s Vincent Thrust during it’s motion in the Cretaceous.