The Alps are an orogen that offers an exceptional natural laboratory to study the evolution of mountain-building processes from short- to long-term and small- to large-scales, including the evolution of plate margins from rifting to subduction, inheritance from previous orogenic cycles, ophiolite emplacement, collision and (ultra)high-pressure rock exhumation, and upper-plate and foreland basin evolution.
Advances in a variety of geophysical, geochronological, geochemical and geological fields provide a rich and growing set of constraints on the crust-lithosphere and mantle structure, tectonics and geodynamics of the entire mountain belt.
We invite contributions from different and multi-disciplinary perspectives ranging from the Earth’s surface to the mantle, and based on geology (tectonics, petrology, stratigraphy, geo- and thermochronology, geochemistry, paleomagnetism and geomorphology), geophysics (seismotectonics, seismic tomography and anisotropy) and geodesy and modelling (numerical and analogue). The aim is for contributions to provide new insights and observations on the record of subduction/exhumation/collision; pre-Alpine orogenic stages; the influence of structural and palaeogeographic configuration; plate/mantle dynamics relationships; coupling between deep and surface processes.