A specialist in tectonic stress and natural hazards risks, she spent most of her career as a research scientist with the United States Geological Survey.
[1] Her father Kent Chetlain was a sports editor with the Bradenton Herald and as a teenager, she operated the McKechnie Field electronic scoreboard during Pittsburgh Pirates spring training games.
After taking a course on plate tectonics and elasticity, she met geophysicist Allan V. Cox at a meeting on solar magnetism in Cape Canaveral.
[4][1] Her doctoral thesis was titled "Mid-miocene rifting in north-central Nevada: A detailed study of late cenozoic deformation in the northern basin and range".
According to Zoback, the work demonstrated "that broad regions of the Earth’s crust in the U.S. were subjected to a uniformly oriented stress field and resulted from large-scale tectonic processes".
Zoback was approached by the president of the International Lithosphere Program with the idea of creating a global map for stress fields.
[3] From 1986 to 1992, Zoback chaired the International Lithosphere Program's World Stress Map project, an open-access public database.
Zoback coordinated the compilation and interpretation of geophysical and geologic data on tectonic stress fields with dozens of scientists from over 30 countries.