A Review of Numerical Simulation Tools for Coupling Earth’s Interior and Lithospheric Stress Fields

As a bridge connecting processes in the Earth’s interior and the superficial lithosphere, distribution characteristics of global stress fields could benefit the verification of geodynamical models and reflect spatial variations of lithospheric strength. Numerical simulation of the global stress field could provide the temporal evolution process of the stress fields, and reveal the dynamic process of accumulation and release of the in situ stress fields as well as the quantitative relationship between force sources and the stress fields, which could compensate for the sparsity and insufficient representativeness of in situ stress observation data. To advance the investigation on the global stress fields, we review the state-of-the-art progress of numerical simulation tools for global stress fields and their applications, and show the existing problems as well as future trends.