The geocentric realm of tectonics changed with the dawn of robotic exploration of the other bodies of the solar system. A diverse assortment of tectonic landforms has been revealed, some familiar and some with no analogues to terrestrial structural features. In this chapter, we briefly introduce some of the major topics in the book. The chapters review what is known about the tectonics on Mercu...

Mobile DNAs have had a central role in shaping our genome. More than half of our DNA is comprised of interspersed repeats resulting from replicative copy and paste events of retrotransposons. Although most are fixed, incapable of templating new copies, there are important exceptions to retrotransposon quiescence. De novo insertions cause genetic diseases and cancers, though reliably detecting t...

From January 9 to 13, 2006, a group of about 70 professional and student researchers gathered at the Hotel Coral in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, to discuss the status of geophysical and geological research in the MARGINS Gulf of California – Salton Trough focus site (Fig. 1). The main goals of the workshop were to summarize emerging new data and results, identify existing gaps in knowledg...

The Earth is composed of layers of different composition and physical properties, principally the solid central core, the fluid peripheral core, the viscous mantle, and the solid lithosphere. The lithosphere is comprised of the upper mantle and the crust, the outer shell of the Earth. There are two types of lithosphere, according to the crust resting on the solid mantle lithosphere (lithospheri...

This paper looks at the challenges confronting plate tectonics— the ruling paradigm in the earth sciences. The classical model of thin lithospheric plates moving over a global asthenosphere is shown to be implausible. Evidence is presented that appears to contradict continental drift, seafloor spreading, and subduction, as well as the claim that the oceanic crust is relatively young. The proble...

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. However, it was not until the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s, that a sufficient geological explanation of that movement was understood. (This arti...

Introduction. The once popular idea that changes in planetary volume play an important role in terrestrial orogeny and tectonics [ I ,2] was generally discarded with the acceptance of plate tectonics. It is nonetheless likely that the Earth has been steadily cooling over the last 3-4 billion years [e.g., 3,4], and the global contraction that accompanied such cooling would have led to a secular ...