Understanding how successive earthquakes accrue on individual faults to produce kilometer-scale displacements, build landscapes and activate cascades of geomorphological processes is still poorly understood. While large-scale geodynamic processes like subduction and orogenesis can be considered continuous over geological timescales (100 ka to Ma), they mostly operate discretely over shorter timescales (< 100 ka). Apparent quiescence is transiently interrupted by pulses of localised tectonic and geomorphic activity, which repeatedly interact and shape the landscape. Long-term permanent crustal deformation forms landscapes, yet geodesy primarily records short-term elastic strain. In this context, the surface expression on individual faults or active margins contains valuable information on both the endogenous and the exogenous processes at work, the complexity of which may be studied in long-term features (e.g. landscape evolution, mountain building, basin formation) as well as short-term data (e.g. geodetic monitoring, paleoseismology).

The scope of this session is to bring together state-of-the-art research efforts to better understand how the short-term rate variability that is often recorded on the Earth’s surface integrates to produce uniform large-scale active tectonic processes (i.e. subduction, collision, rifting, transform faulting). We welcome contributions combining observations and analogue & numerical modelling. We would also particularly value studies that bridge deformational processes operating over different spatial and temporal scales.