Salt and shale tectonics play a fundamental role in controlling the structural and stratigraphic evolution of sedimentary basins and mountain belts. Their complex rheological behaviour strongly influences deformation patterns, sedimentary systems, basin architecture, and the coupling between deep crustal processes and shallow deformation. Despite major advances over recent decades, many questions remain regarding the initiation, evolution, and dynamics of salt- and shale-related deformation and their interactions with regional tectonics and sedimentation.
This session welcomes recent advances in salt and shale tectonics across a broad range of tectonic settings, including extensional, contractional, strike-slip, and gravity-driven systems such as rifted margins. We invite contributions from both onshore and offshore settings, encompassing a wide variety of approaches, including subsurface and outcrop studies, seismic imaging and processing, numerical and analogue modelling, experimental approaches, and rock-mechanics analyses.
We particularly encourage contributions addressing salt and shale tectonics across multiple spatial and temporal scales, from the relationships between crustal-scale tectonics, evaporite deposition, and salt deformation in sedimentary basins and mountain belts, to the interactions between salt bodies and their surrounding sediments, and deformation within evaporite sequences themselves. Studies investigating the coupling between tectonics, sedimentation, and salt or shale mobility are particularly encouraged, together with contributions addressing applied aspects of salt tectonics, including drilling-related geohazards associated with salt structures.
Contributions focusing on shale tectonics, as well as studies exploring similarities, differences, and interactions between salt- and shale-driven deformation, are also especially welcome. By bringing together observations, imaging, experiments, and modelling, this session aims to foster discussion of recent advances, unresolved questions, and future directions in salt and shale tectonics.