9706475 Schloz One of the more critical gaps in our understanding of faults and fault evolution is that of how the stresses around active faults interact. The interaction can govern fault spacing, and can cause linkage and coalescence of small faults that leads to the development of larger faults. The project is a field based study of cm, m, and km scale faulting the Appalachians and in the northern east African rift zone, where the geometry of faults will be measured and plotted. The final analysis will be aided by discrete element elastic modeling, which should lead to general conclusions about any active faulting everywhere.