Haibin Yang, Louis Moresi and Mark Quigley provide a scaling relationship for the fault spacing in continental strike-slip shear zones.

Katie Cooper, Rebecca Farrington and Meghan Miller explain how cratonic lithosphere can be sculpted by flow from a passing subducting slab.

Figure: Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller CC BY Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney ; Maria Seton, University of Sydney , and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney Classical plate tectonic theory was developed in the 1960s.

Though giant earthquakes are disastrous, they provide essential information to investigate earthquake physics. Thyagarajulu Gollapalli, a PhD student jointly from Monash University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, discusses our present understanding of such big earthquakes.

Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress, early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists. Adam Beall, Katie Cooper and Louis Moresi have recently proposed that cratons were made by the catastrophic switching on of plate tectonics.

Modelling the relative time-scales of the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability and delamination, using Underworld Why model sub-continental gravitational instabilities? Within the plate tectonics framework, continents are generally considered to have a much lower density than the asthenosphere below and therefore avoid the kind of recycling that the oceanic crust and lithosphere undergoes.