A deeply eroded orogen in southwest New Zealand preserves a record of changing flow patterns in the middle and lower crust during a transition from contraction and crustal thickening to extension and crustal thinning. The New Zealand exposures show that deformation patterns at mid-lower crustal depths were strongly influenced by local variations in crustal structure, temperature, composition, magmatic activity, and rheology. Kinematic parameters, including the orientation of shear zone boundaries, the degree of non-coaxiality and kinematic partitioning, strain symmetry, and whether shear zones were thickening or thinning in different planes of observation, were extremely variable spatially and changed repeatedly over...