This session is aimed to gather works from different disciplines that focus on anisotropy within the crust. The main intention is to collect information from top to bottom of the crust, about how this phenomenon presents itself to our investigations, about how the presence of anisotropy can mislead the understanding of the crustal structures, and about how much of the anisotropy, observed with indirect methods, is reliable. The analysis of anisotropy provides information on elastic characteristics of the layers constituting the crust and is linked to the past and actual stress field. To localize crustal anisotropy, quantify it and determine its orientation is a topic of extremely high interest since it leads to a better understanding of the actual dynamics, but can be tricky since several effects contribute to blur the measurements.
Crustal deformation and flow patterns resulting from tectonic processes are often constrained by observations on the anisotropic characteristics of the crust; with the integration between field data and laboratory experiments, steps towards a better understanding of the physical processes that can produce anisotropy can be done, and that is what this session is meant to do.
Possible contributions come from seismic observations, geodynamical modeling, tectonophysics, tectonics, structural geology, magnetotellurics, and mineral and rock physics; studies about temporal-variation of crustal anisotropy are particularly encouraged.

Invited speaker: J-M. Kendall, University of Bristol, UK