The motions of continental plates over geological time reshape Earth’s surface, forming mountains where plates converge and rifts where they move apart. The destruction and creation of continental plate boundaries tends to occur in similar locations.
A classic example is the Wilson Cycle in the North Atlantic region: Here closure of the Iapetus Ocean formed the Caledonian Mountains in the Silurian, while the present-day North Atlantic Ocean opened near the Caledonides in the early Cenozoic.
In this lecture, Dr Susanne Buiter will review geodynamic experiments that investigate the Wilson Cycle of subduction, collision and rifting and use these results to discuss the effects of collisional inheritance on the architecture of continental rifted margins.