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Tectonics

Tectonics  is the process that controls the structure and properties of the Earth's lithosphere and its evolution through time. In particular, it describes the processes of mountain building, the growth and behavior of the strong, old cores of continents known as cratons, the formation of oceanic and continental crust, and the ways in which the relatively rigid plates that constitute the Earth's outer shell interact with each other. Tectonics also provides a framework for understanding earthquakes and volcanic belts that directly affect much of the global population. Tectonic studies are important as guides for economic geologists searching for fossil fuels and ore deposits of metallic and nonmetallic resources. An understanding of tectonic principles is essential to geomorphologists to explain erosion patterns and other Earth surface features.

Tectonics is the most important control on sedimentation. The important effects of tectonics on sedimentation, direct or indirect, include the nature of sediment rate of sediment supply rate of deposition depositional environment nature of source rocks nature of vertical succession. Tectonic processes affect the climate by way of effects as broad as the distribution of oceans and continents, and as local as rain shielding by local mountain ranges. Sedimentation itself affects tectonics, although to a much lesser extent, mainly by increasing the lithospheric loading in the basin. By far the best way of telling paleotectonics is by the sedimentary record in sedimentary basins, e.g. along the boundary areas of Alpine-type orogens. The disposition of sediment types, sediment thicknesses, and paleocurrents in a basin gives evidence of the existence and location of elevated areas of the crust created by tectonism. Processes of basin formation and subsidence can be analyzed at all scales by combined stratigraphic, sedimentological and structural geological-tectonic-geophysical methods in order to reconstruct the interaction between deep lithospheric processes in collisional orogens, and surface processes (isostatic uplift and topography, erosion and morphological evolution).

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