EARTHQUAKE SOURCE PARAMETERS, SEISMICITY, AND TECTONICS OF THE OCEANOGRAPHER TRANSFORM FAULT

The Earth Materials Area is comprises the Experimental Petrology, Rock Physics, Thermochronology and Structure & Tectonics Groups. The research of these groups centres around laboratory based measurements under controlled conditions, simulating those occurring in nature, but these activities are complimented by field based observations, often in collaboration with scientists from other institut...

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...

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...