Page 5 - Microtectonics

Preface

The origin of this book lies in a practical course in microtectonics started by Prof.
Henk Zwart at Leiden University, the Netherlands, in the early 1960s. Both of us were
students of Henk Zwart at the University of Leiden and later, as his assistants, charged
with the organisation of this course. As such, we became enchanted by the many inter-
esting thin sections of his collection which expanded over the years, as Henk extended
his work from the Pyrenees to the Alps, the Scandinavian Caledonides and to many
other places in the world. An explanatory text was elaborated and regularly updated
by a number of assistants, including us, under Henk’s supervision. This text, together
with many thin sections of the collection, served as a core for the present book. In the
early 1980s, the Geology Department of Leiden University was transferred to the Uni-
versity of Utrecht. The collection was transferred as well, and one of us (C.W.P.) be-
came responsible for its organisation and maintenance. A visit of R.A.J.T. to Utrecht
in 1991 with a number of didactic microstructures collected in South America trig-
gered the final effort to build a manual for the study of microtectonics. Because of his
contributions to science and his enthusiasm for microtectonics, we dedicate this book
to Henk Zwart, who inspired us, taught us the principals of microtectonic analysis,
and also furnished many crucial examples of microstructures.
The first edition of “Microtectonics” from 1996 is now outdated, and we felt that the
large amount of new work in microtectonics warranted the setup of this second edi-
tion. This edition contains nearly all the old material, but adds material on new re-
search of the last ten years and some material that was left out of the first edition for
several reasons. As a result, the number of figures has increased from 254 to 322 and
the number of references from 659 to 1451.
Few geologists will be able to remember what their first impression was when they
were confronted with a deformed rock under the microscope. That is unfortunate,
because it inhibits experienced geologists from looking at geometries in thin section
in an unbiased way. We commonly think that we ‘see’ processes such as dynamic re-
crystallisation, refolding and grain growth, while all we actually see are geometric
patterns that may have formed in a number of different ways. In this book, we try to
preserve some of the ‘first encounter approach’ with deformed rocks and follow some
guidelines that result from many years of teaching structural geology. First of all, struc-
tural geology and microtectonics are visual sciences, and need good and abundant
illustrations to be properly understood. The result will be obvious for anyone who
pages through this book. Secondly, there is no harm in explaining features at a basic
level rather than in full detail for specialists; specialists can skip simple explanations,
but all those who are new to the subject have better access to the content of the book if
things are explained in a simple way. Finally, there is nothing more frustrating than to
know that a certain subject has been covered in the literature, but not to know who
wrote about it. Therefore, we have included a large number of references throughout
the text.
The following critical readers of the original manuscript for the first edition helped
considerably to improve the quality with useful suggestions: Hans de Bresser, Bas den
Brok, Paul Dirks, David Gray, Monica Heilbron, Renée Heilbronner, Ralph Hetzel, Kyu-