Afghanistan sits on the junction between the Indo-Australasian and Eurasian crustal plates and is composed of a series of terranes (Figure 1) that broke away from the main Gondwana supercontinent before colliding with and being accreted on to the Eurasian plate. The accretionary events began in the Cretaceous and have continued until recent times. The Herat or Hari Rod fault, which runs E-W acr...

The stratigraphies of foreland basins have been related to orogeny, where continent-continent collision causes the construction of topography and the downwarping of the foreland plate. These mechanisms have been inferred for the Molasse basin, stretching along the northern margin of the European Alps. Continuous flexural bending of the subducting European lithosphere as a consequence of topogra...

Early studies on Melanesian mountain systems provided insights for fundamental evolutionary and ecological concepts. These island-like systems are thought to provide opportunities in the form of newly formed, competition-free niches. Here we show that a hyperdiverse radiation of freshwater arthropods originated in the emerging central New Guinea orogen, out of Australia, about 10 million years ...

Over summer 2017, I continued my research on dikes emplaced during the waning stages of the Neoproterozoic-Ordovician Ross Orogen, a continental arc along the present day location of the Transantarctic Mountains in Antarctica. The dikes intrude calc-alkaline plutons constituting the main intrusive phase as well as metasedimentary rocks formed during early stages of orogenesis. These dikes compr...

The Early Paleozoic Lachlan Fold Belt of eastern Australia is widely regarded as an ancient convergent plate margin beneath which paleo-Pacific (Panthalassic) oceanic lithosphere was continuously subducted. It is cited as the type example of a retreating accretionary orogeny. However, sandstone compositions, the sedimentological nature and timing of chert accumulation and overall stratigraphic ...