Cratons

Cratons are stable continental regions of the Earth and they are used by RAPID-N in determining the tectonic setting of an earthquake by using the ShakeMap approach (Allen et al., 2008).

Boundary data is taken from the OpenSHA ShakeMap Tectonic Polygons data file (OpenSHA, 2010), which is based on global craton maps provided by Johnston et al. (1994). Bounds are calculated by using the "Calculate Bounds" tool of the system.

An example craton is illustrated in Figure 1.