Principles Of Rock Deformation And Tectonics

This book originates in the French classic "Principes de Tectonique" (Masson, 1983), written by professor Adolphe Nicolas, and the more recent "Principes de Tectonique" by J.L. Bouchez and A. Nicolas (De Boeck, 2018). This English edition is an up-to-date and augmented version that keeps the concise and rigorous writing of its inspiring predecessors. It is largely based on laboratory and field experience of both authors, with a focus towards hard rocks and magmatic rocks from both the continental crust worldwide and the mantle, principally from the Oman ophiolites. The book includes more than 250 illustrations, most of them original. In addition to classic geological subjects, the book includes elements such as plastic deformation of ice, quartz and olivine, fabric acquisition in rocks and magmas, measurement and orientation of stress, together with basic background information on neotectonics, geophysics and other practical tools such as magnetic fabrics not commonly treated in geological books. Since the targeted readers are present day young students, a few exercises of structural geology are included to improve their abilities. This book aims principally at students of Geology, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. However, due to its numerous illustrations and rather concise writing, anyone interested in rock deformation and/or tectonics will find key answers in this book.

Physicists attempt to reduce natural phenomena to their essential dimensions by means of simplification and approximation and to account for them by defining natural laws. Paradoxically, whilst there is a critical need in geology to reduce the overwhelming field information to its essentials, it often re mains in an over-descriptive state. This prudent attitude of geologists is dictated by the nature of the subjects being consi dered, as it is often difficult to derive the significant parame ters from the raw data. It also follows from the way that geolo gical work is carried out. Geologists proceed, as in a police investigation, by trying to reconstruct past conditions and events from an analysis of the features preserved in rocks. In physics all knowledge is based on experiment but in the Earth Sciences experimental evidence is of very limited scope and is difficult to interpret. The geologist's cautious approach in accepting evidence gained by modelling and quantification is sometimes questionable when it is taken too far. It shuts out potentially fruitful lines of advance; for instance when refu sing order of magnitude calculations, it risks being drowned in anthropomorphic speculation. Happily nowadays, many more studies tend to separate and order the significant facts and are carried out with numerical constraints, which although they are approxi mate in nature, limit the range of hypotheses and thus give rise to new models.

The book is an up-to-date and augmented version that keeps the concise and rigorous writing of its inspiring French language predecessors. It is based on laboratory and field experience of both authors, with a focus towards hard rocks and magmatic rocks from both the continental crust worldwide and the mantle, principally from the Oman ophiolites.--

Physicists attempt to reduce natural phenomena to their essential dimensions by means of simplification and approximation and to account for them by defining natural laws. Paradoxically, whilst there is a critical need in geology to reduce the overwhelming field information to its essentials, it often re mains in an over-descriptive state. This prudent attitude of geologists is dictated by the nature of the subjects being consi dered, as it is often difficult to derive the significant parame ters from the raw data. It also follows from the way that geolo gical work is carried out. Geologists proceed, as in a police investigation, by trying to reconstruct past conditions and events from an analysis of the features preserved in rocks. In physics all knowledge is based on experiment but in the Earth Sciences experimental evidence is of very limited scope and is difficult to interpret. The geologist's cautious approach in accepting evidence gained by modelling and quantification is sometimes questionable when it is taken too far. It shuts out potentially fruitful lines of advance; for instance when refu sing order of magnitude calculations, it risks being drowned in anthropomorphic speculation. Happily nowadays, many more studies tend to separate and order the significant facts and are carried out with numerical constraints, which although they are approxi mate in nature, limit the range of hypotheses and thus give rise to new models.

This book consists of 18 papers on deformation mechanisms, rheology and tectonics. The main approaches include experimental rock deformation, microstructural analysis, field structural studies, analogue and numerical modelling. New results on various topics are presented, ranging from brittle to ductile deformation and grain-scale to lithospherescale mechanisms. The volume contains review papers on several major current topics, such as the rheology of the lithospheric mantle and the mechanisms of exhumation of high-pressure tectonic units, as well as research papers on kinematic and mechanical analysis of rock deformation and related new techniques. Several contributions emphasize the increasing ability and wish of researchers to strengthen the links between small-scale physical mechanisms and large-scale tectonics. The volume will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers in the fields of structural geology, interactions between metamorphism, fluids and deformation, and large-scale tectonic processes.

The motion and deformation of rocks are processes of fundamental importance in shaping the Earth, from outer crustal layers to the deep mantle. Reconstructions of the evolution of the Earth therefore require detailed knowledge of the geometry of deformation structures and their relative timing, of the motions leading to deformation structures and of the mechanisms governing these motions. This volume contains a collection of 22 papers on field, experimental and theoretical studies that add to our knowledge of these processes.