GSA special paper presents new studies of Western US ea...( Boulder CO USA The Great BasinSierr...)

Boulder, CO, USA The Great BasinSierra Nevada transition zone has received substantial attention over the past decade, due in part to the recognition that nearly 25% of the relative motion between the Pacific and North American plates is accommodated along this tectonic boundary. This Geological Society of America Special Paper presents new research and results on the geology, geophysics, geodesy, and paleontology of areas within this tectonic boundary zone, which stretches from southern California to central Oregon.

This tectonic boundary, originally recognized by Augustus Locke and colleagues in 1940, evolved during the Late Cenozoic as relative plate motion was broadly distributed from the California borderland into the Mojave Desert and the Basin and Range Province.

Volume editors John Oldow of the University of Texas at Dallas and Patricia Cashman of the University of NevadaReno have assembled 16 chapters that reflect the broad scope of topical studies underway in this region. Constraints and insights into the zone's Neogene structure and evolution are documented and illustrated through a range of analytic strategies, including biostratigraphic, stratigraphic, and structural analysis of Tertiary basin deposits, seismologic investigations of active deformation, and calculations of velocity and strain fields as determined from space geodesy.

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