Buoyancy contrasts between oceanic lithosphere and continental lithosphere may lead to subduction, the driving of the oceanic plate below the continental plate. This process of subduction is common around our planet and it is expressed as, for example, the Pacific Rim of Fire. It is called this due to the chains of volcanoes that outline the Rim. Another consequence of subduction is extensive seismicity or earthquake energy release. In order to understand the evolution of subduction regimes it is critical for basic research into the geometric evolution of the continental crust to continue. This research is at the cutting edge of the field of tectonics, with indirect implications for volcanism, earthquake hazard mitigation, genesis of metallic ores, and thermal and fluid distribution in the crust. Unless we understand the geometric evolution of the Earth at depth we will never fully understand the processes that control these issues.
Oceanic lithosphere subducts beneath continental lithosphere along a variety of trajectories, generally characterized as steep, shallow, or flat. About ten percent of Earth's subduction zones consist of extensive shallowly dipping or flat subducted slabs, indicating the tectonic removal of mantle lithosphere forming the base of the continent. Overriding continental plate orogens in such cases possess zones of intensified crustal shortening and gaps in arc magmatism. Shallow subduction zone segments are also known to steepen with time, but the geological consequences of such steepening are poorly understood. The fact that the remnants of shallow and flat subduction zones are so rarely recognized in ancient orogens suggests that the tectonic processes attendant in their complete life cycle disrupt the crust to such a state that the defining characteristics are lost. In the southern Sierra Nevada-Mojave Desert an ~500 km long segment of the Cretaceous active margin has been shown to have experienced the complete life cycle of a shallow slab segment in the Farallon plate. There is evidence indicating that during the demise of this shallow slab segment large magnitude extension deformed the overriding plate. It also appears that material subducted along that shallow trajectory rapidly ascended back out the upper levels of the subduction zone, coupling extensional strain into the overriding plate. This study employs geologic mapping and structural analysis, petrography, microfabric analysis, thermobarometry, and geochronology to quantify the amount of overriding plate extension, and to determine the strain, displacement and thermal history of the underlying subduction assemblage.
