TS Must-read series, the wrap up In 2020, we started the Must Read activity by asking the TS community a simple question: which papers do you think every tectonics and structural geology student should read? that led to more than a thousand nominations and lively debate. A short list of 48 Must Read papers was …[Read More]
To kick off the New Year, we have invited a guest author, Takafumi Maruishi, a researcher in the Research Division for Volcanic Disasters / Center for Volcano Research Promotion, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, Japan. He explains the scaling law of lava dome growth and its physical insight. Effusive eruptions—when magma …[Read More]
The region around the Pic Saint-Loup is a popular destination for many European universities to teach mapping field courses – and there is a reason for it, even besides the great landscape, good food and nice weather. Let’s take a tour to discover why! The Pic Saint-Loup itself is indeed so impressive that some former …[Read More]
Shear zones are areas of intense deformation that localize the movement of one block of the crust with respect to another. In previous posts, we have seen that shear zones contain some very deformed rocks called mylonites, lineations that tell us the direction of movement, and useful kinematic indicators, such as S-C fabrics, that allow …[Read More]
Deep beneath our feet, deformation of rocks at high temperature produces impressive structures such as shear zones, that localize the movement of two volumes of rock with respect to one another. Shear zones are strongly deformed bands with strongly foliated structures (i.e., with rocks that look like a pile of leaves) and kinematic indicators, such …[Read More]
The San Andreas Fault in California, the Alpine Fault in New Zealand, or the Main Frontal Thrust in the Himalayas are some of the most famous and largest fault zones that accommodate the relative displacement between two adjacent crustal blocks. Such faults, however, represent only the shallower expression of something much bigger: a crustal shear …[Read More]
An angular unconformity is an erosional surface that truncates older, tilted sedimentary layers and that is overlain by younger layers, oriented parallel to the unconformity. The discovery and interpretation of angular unconformities, like the famous Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar Point, Scotland, marked a paradigm shift in the geological theories of the 18th century. At that …[Read More]
In one of the former episodes of the ‘Features from the field’ series we have talked about foliations, and how they develop when rocks are pushed together by the movement of tectonic plates. It is quite uncommon, however, that tectonic forces are active in the same direction for an unlimited period of time. The rule, …[Read More]
Have you ever walked on a mountain trail, passing past outcrops of rocks and noticed that many rocks appear to be split along a well-defined orientation? If you have, you might have seen one of the most important structures in metamorphic rocks – called foliation. The term ‘foliation’ derives from the Latin folium, meaning ‘leaf’. …[Read More]
For this edition of Minds over Methods, we have invited Nick Roberts, a research scientist at the British Geological Survey, working within the Geochronology and Tracers Facility (GTF) running a LA-ICP-MS laboratory. Nick has a background in ‘hard-rock’ geology, incorporating geochemistry, geochronology, and magmatic and metamorphic petrology across a wide range of tectonic settings, and …[Read More]
