The Origin of Arcs

Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of papers presented as distinguished guest lectures at the International Conference on ``The Origin of Arcs'' held at the University of Urbino in September 1986, under the joint sponsorship of the European Union of Geosciences and the Italian Geological Society. The workshop on island and mountain arcs has been organized with the aim of increasing our understanding of the intrinsic nature of orogenic and post-orogenic processes, on the basis of empiric factual data, rather than particular theoretic models. Quite often a trivial piece of field data appears to bear much more weight than many fascinating hypotheses put forward by the human mind. This seems to be much more valid in geology, where a special method is necessitated by the particular nature of the geological phenomena and the time concept. Every general law deduced should be rooted in the study of the earth's development in geological time. It is the editor's opinion that there must first be an inductive picture by means of geological methods and then it must be interpreted by geophysicists in the light of physical laws. The geological method must serve, besides, to test the historical credibility of geophysical theories. It is clear that these two methods, the geological-historical one and the geophysical one, must be complementary and the one must not substitute the other. Since the problem of the structure and origin of arcs is open to several solutions, different factors being still unexplained, all correctly deduced opinions are considered by the editor. The contributors to this pre-conference volume have been asked to present essential geological results, as concrete as possible, on some basic problems, such as: Are the island and mountain arcs primary or induced features? How have these orogenic festoons developed into their similar regular shapes? What are the relationships between "primary" active arcs and "secondary" mountain arcs? What is the dominant deformational factor in the bulging of the arc? What is the real nature and tectonic significance of the Benioff zone? These papers have been grouped into five more or less natural sections, of which three are defined on the basis of geography. But of course several range broadly and the classification serves only to channel the discussion in a practical way.