Stress controls on faulting, fracturing and igneous intrusion in the Earth's crust

A meeting to commemorate the work of Ernest Masson Anderson on the 50th anniversary of his death.

6-8 September 2010 at the University of Glasgow, UK

Organisers: Zoe Shipton, Rick Sibson, Dave Healy, Rob Butler, Heather Moir.

E.M Anderson (1877-1960) was one of the 20th centuries most influential structural geologists, for his 1905 paper and his 1942/51 book on "The Dynamics of Faulting and Dyke Formation with Application to Britain". This contains some simple but profound insights into stress and fault development in the brittle crust - namely that there are three basic stress regimes in the crust and that three fundamental classes of fault should therefore exist if these stress conditions are combined with the Coulomb criterion for brittle shear failure.  He also argued convincingly for stress controls on the orientation of high-level igneous intrusions (dykes, cone sheets, etc.).   It is notable that his 1905 paper predicted the existence of subvertical wrench (strike-slip) faults well before most geologists were prepared to accept that such faults existed or were important.  One year later came the 1906 San Francisco strike-slip rupture on the San Andreas Fault!

Modern measurements of tectonic stress, stress inversions from fault slip data and focal mechanism analyses have largely verified his supposition that one of the principal stresses is usually vertical.  Seismology also shows that his three fundamental fault classes account for a high proportion of observed focal mechanisms. The work continues to underpin much research on the borderline between structural geology and seismology. 

Contributors to the meeting are invited to reappraise 'Andersonian' concepts (e.g. how often, and under what conditions, do stress trajectories deviate significantly from the vertical and the horizontal) in the light of our present understanding of stress, failure mechanics, and igneous intrusive processes in the crust.

Note: the abstract deadline has been extended, we are still accepting abstracts.

Meeting sponsored by the Tectonic Studies Group.