Tectonics of sedimentary basins / Тектоника осадочных бассейнов

The plate tectonic revolution of the 1960’s provided the first unified framework for models on the origin of mountain belts and basins; this resulted in an outpouring of landmark papers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. When Ray Ingersoll and Cathy Busby taught Tectonics of Sedimentary Basins in the late 1980s (at UCLA and UCSB respectively), they were frustrated by a lack of textbooks or summary papers on this topic. Instead, professors were forced to compile impossibly long reading lists for their students, and try to synthesize he material for them. For this reason, Professors Busby and Ingersoll decided to edit a textbook on the topic for Blackwell, to be aimed at the senior undergraduate to professional geologist level. This was an exhaustive treatment that took five years to produce, and it was published in 1995 (Busby and Ingersoll, 1995). Online access to the 1995 book is provided by the publisher, because it still provides a valid and complete introduction to the topic. We recommend that the undergraduate geology student begin with the 1995 book, and that the graduate student and professional refer to it as needed while reading the new book. Fifteen years later, there have been many advances in our understanding of the plate tectonic controls on basin formation and evolution. One large area of growth has been in the field of active tectonics, where advances in global positioning and stratigraphic or surface dating techniques allow workers to compare present-day plate motions with the growth of structures on the time scale of thousands of years. Our understanding of the sedimentary response to tectonic events has been improved through numerical/ analog modeling and detailed field observations. Major advances have been made in studies of the subsurface, through seismic surveys of crustal to upper mantle structure, as well as 3D seismic surveys of basin fills, in some areas augmented by cores. Isotopic studies of detrital minerals (e.g., U-Pb zircon) are now widely used to reconstruct tectonic events, including largescale basin translation, patterns of unroofing in regions around basins, and reconstruction of sediment pathways across continents through time. Paleomagnetic methods are now very widely employed for precise dating and correlation of strata, for determining sources and flow paths of widespread volcanic units, and for evaluating the importance of tectonic rotation. Another new approach to understanding tectonic problems is the use of ArcGIS to manipulate geochronological, geochemical, biostratigraphic, and paleomagnetic databases, in concert with satellite, air photograph, and geologic map data. At the same time, proliferation of detailed models for complex volcanic-volcaniclastic dispersaldepositional systems has permitted detailed tectonic reconstruction of a wider range of basin types, with dateable fill. Last but not least, numerical and analog modeling of geodynamic processes is more sophisticated than ever. <...>