The Shanxi Rift is a young, active rift in northern China that formed atop a Proterozoic orogen. The impact of these structures on active rift faults is poorly understood. Here, we quantify the landscape response to active faulting and compare it with published maps of inherited structures. We find that inherited structures played an important role in the segmentation of the Shanxi Rift and in the development of rift interaction zones, which are the most active regions in the Shanxi Rift.

At the high temperatures present in the deeper crust, minerals such as quartz can flow much like silly putty. The detailed mechanisms of how atoms are reorganized depends upon several factors, such as the temperature and the rate of which the mineral changes shape. We present observations from a naturally deformed rock showing that the amount of water present also influences the type of deformation in quartz, with implications for geological interpretations.

The Earth's internal dynamics and structure can be well understood by combining seismological and geodynamic modelling with mineral physics, an approach that has been poorly adopted in the past. To this end we have developed ECOMAN, an open-source software package that is intended to overcome the computationally intensive nature of this multidisciplinary methodology and the lack of a dedicated and comprehensive computational framework.

We investigate the along-strike variation in volcanics on the Pelotas segment of the Brazilian margin created during continental breakup and formation of the southern South Atlantic.  We show that the volume of volcanics strongly controls the amount of space available for post-breakup sedimentation. We also show that breakup varies along-strike from very magma-rich to magma-normal within a relatively short distance of less than 300 km. This is not as expected from a simple mantle plume model.

Understanding strain accumulation processes in shear zones is essential for explaining failure mechanisms at great crustal depths. This study explores the rheological and kinematic factors determining the varying modes of shear accommodation in natural shear zones. Numerical simulations suggest that an interplay of parameters – initial viscosity, bulk shear rate, and internal cohesion – governs the dominance of one accommodation mechanism over another.