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Kinematics of ductile shear zones with deformable or mobile walls

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Abstract

Shear zones are important phenomena in the Earth’s middle and lower crust and are of great interest to structural geologists. Models involving rigid boundaries moving parallel to themselves are extended here to include the case where (i) walls are deformable and (ii) mobile rigid walls approach each other. These models are combined with Couette and Poiseuille flow to define a broad range of kinematic possibilities. Deformable wall models lead to smooth transitions from deformed to undeformed materials as well as with the zone transitions to gentler and more spread out deformation. Mobile walls, on the other hand, lead to shear zones where shear sense can change along a shear zone boundary.

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Acknowledgements

IIT Bombay provided a research sabbatical for the year 2017, and a CPDA grant to SM. PhD student Dripta Dutta (IIT Bombay) partially assisted in arranging a few plates. SM dedicates this work to Prof. Alokesh Chatterjee for teaching him and his batch structural geology with great patience and detail during SM’s BSc studies (1996–1999) in the then Presidency College, Kolkata. Saibal Gupta is thanked for handling this paper. Several concerns raised by the two anonymous reviewers greatly clarified the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Mathematics, School of Mathematical Sciences, University College, Cork, Ireland

    Kieran F Mulchrone

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 400 076, India

    Soumyajit Mukherjee

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  1. Kieran F Mulchrone
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  2. Soumyajit Mukherjee
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Correspondence to Kieran F Mulchrone.

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Com,mu,ni,cated by Saibal Gupta

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Mulchrone, K.F., Mukherjee, S. Kinematics of ductile shear zones with deformable or mobile walls. J Earth Syst Sci 128, 218 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-019-1238-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-019-1238-y

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