This Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, The Evolving Continents: Understanding Processes of Continental Growth, is dedicated to the long and spectacular career of Brian F. Windley, a pioneer in the application of uniformitarianism to Precambrian rocks, a leader in linking field geology with the geochemistry and geochronology of different orogenic units with global tectonic history, and an overall polymath who has had a deep influence on many fields of geological sciences.

The Analyzing Development Issues (ADI) team and research participants express their gratitude to the Bunong indigenous people in the Mondulkiri villages of Gati and Pou Rapeth for sharing with us their experiences of interacting with the corporate mining companies in their midst. The researchers would also like to thank the local authorities and mining officials in Mondulkiri who cooperated in this study. Tien Hien Tang and Vaing Samrith from Development and Partnership in Action (DPA) assisted the fieldwork in Gati village in Keo Seima district.

The African continent preserves a long geological record that covers almost 75% of Earth’s history. The Pan-African orogeny (c. 600–500 Ma) brought together old continental kernels (or cratons such as West African, Congo, Kalahari and Tanzania) forming Gondwana and subsequently the supercontinent Pangea by the late Palaeozoic (Fig. 1).
The break-up of Pangea since the Jurassic and Cretaceous, primarily through the opening of the Central Atlantic (e.g. Torsvik et al. 2008; Labails et al. 2010), Indian (e.g. Gaina et al. 2007; Mu¨ller et al. 2008; Cande et al. 2010) and South Atlantic (e.g. Torsvik et al. 2009) oceans and the complicated subduction history to the north gradually shaped the African continent and its surrounding oceanic basins. Many first-order questions of African geology are still unanswered.

It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of the successful development of shale gas and tight oil to the energy economy of the United States. According to data tracked by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), by 2009, shale gas had led the United States from natural gas shortages to becoming the largest producer of natural gas in the world (USEIA, 2018). Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals constructed on the US East Coast at the start of the 21st century for energy imports were converted less than a decade later to export LNG to Europe and elsewhere. The Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian basin is now the most productive natural gas formation in the United States (Fig. I.1). <...>