Laboratory experiments have established that many earth materials are strongly anisotropic. Observations of azimuthal and radial anisotropy in the upper mantle are attributed to the lattice-preferred orientation (LPO) of olivine caused by the shear strains associated with deformation, and provide some of the most direct evidence for deformation and flow within Earth’s interior. Although observa...

Tertiary to present deformation in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula reflects spatial and temporal variations of the activity of the plate boundaries. Local deformation patterns observed in many of the numerous intraplate Tertiary basins and their borders, such as the Madrid Basin and the Sierra de Altomira, are at first sight incompatible with the regional stress field under which they wer...

A key challenge for volcanological science and hazard management is that few of the world's volcanoes are effectively monitored. Satellite imagery covers volcanoes globally throughout their eruptive cycles, independent of ground-based monitoring, providing a multidecadal archive suitable for probabilistic analysis linking deformation with eruption. Here we show that, of the 198 volcanoes system...

[1] We perform numerical modeling to investigate the mechanisms leading to the postcollisional tectonic evolution of the Alps. We model the lithospheric deformation as a viscous thin sheet with vertically averaged rheology and coupled with surface mass transport. The applied kinematic boundary conditions simulate the convergence between the Adria indenter and the European foreland during the la...

Mid-ocean ridges, transform faults, subduction and continental collisions form the conventional theory of plate tectonics to explain non-rigid behaviour at plate boundaries. However, the theory does not explain directly the processes involved in intraplate deformation and seismicity. Recently, damage structures in the lithosphere have been linked to the origin of plate tectonics. Despite seismo...

The Sumatran GPS array spans approximately 1300 km along the West coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Almost 40 monitoring stations periodically collect high accuracy continuous GPS readings, and convey these to a central server for post-processing in Singapore. Solutions from the array data are used to provide precise measurements of the deformation of the earth's surface over large distances: in eff...

Introduction: The Iberian Pyritic Belt (IPB) consists of a 250-km long geological unit included into the South-Portuguese geotectonical zone of the Iberian Peninsula. It is comprised by an acid volcanosedimentary complex ranging in age from upper Devonian to Carboniferous where different metallic ores were formed in response to hydrotermalism and tectonic related to the Variscan Orogeny [1, 2]....

Preferred orientation in granitic mylonites from the Santa Rosa mylonite zone in Southern California is investigated with time-of-flight neutron diffraction. Quartz and biotite display strong preferred orientation, whereas, feldspar alignment is weak. For quartz, a c-axis maximum in the intermediate fabric direction is consistent with dynamic recrystallization. Pole figures for positive and neg...

New GPS estimates of relative motion across the Jura Mountain Belt with respect to the Eurasian Plate indicate less than 1 mm/ yr of convergence, considerably less than previous estimates. Velocity uncertainties have been evaluated by several methods and range from 0.2 to 0.5 mm/yr for the semi-permanent stations. The major, statistically-significant strain feature inferred by the Jura GPS meas...