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Abstract The Cordilleran orogen lies on the western part of the North American continent and rims the northeastern Pacific Ocean Basin. That part of the orogen covered in this volume extends between the Mexican and Canadian borders, with some consideration of the geology on both sides of the border, and from the offshore continental borderlands of the Pacific eastward as far as the Black Hills of South Dakota and the mountains of west Texas. It ranges from 800 to 1, 600 km wide and is physiographically complex, consisting of high mountains, intervening lowlands, and plateaus that rise from a more gentle continental interior (Fig. 1). The physiography of the Cordillera largely reflects the younger underlying structure, and the present orogenic belt has limits coincident with its physiography.

Abstract The Cordilleran orogen, with an evolution that has spanned the entire Phanerozoic, is one of the longest lived orogenic belts on the planet. A reason for its long history is that since at least Cambrian time the Re has been a large region underlain by oceanic lithosphere to the west of continental North America, and such continent-ocean lithospheric boundaries are tectonically unstable. Interaction between these two types of lithosphere resulted in intermittent tectonic activity during Paleozoic time, and nearly continuous tectonic activity during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Because Pacific oceanic plates are still present west of North America, the Cordilleran orogen continues to evolve. Plateboundary interactions along the western boundary of North America have included diverse types of convergent, divergent, and transform activity as well as combinations of these plateboundary interactions. Fortunately, the preservation of a large tract of Mesozoic and Cenozoic oceanic lithosphere west of North America enables the evolution of Pacific Basin plates to be reconstructed for Cenozoic time and, with less certainty, back to middle Mesozoic time (Engebretson and othe Rs, 1985; Stock and Molnar, 1988). Such reconstructions permit correlation between continental geology and lithospheric plate interactions to a degree uncommon in most post-Paleozoic orogens, and provide a testing ground for relating oceanic plate tectonics to continental deformation and evolution.

Abstract The aim of this volume has been to present a study of basin evolution within the Pannonian basin, which is more accurately called the Pannonian basin system because it consists of several individual basins. The papers contained in this volume were designed to present basic data from a wide variety of geological disciplines, and to integrate these different data sets into acomprehensive study of the evolution ofthe Pannonian basin. These papers have focused not only on evolution of the basins themselves, but also on attendant processes within the crust and upper mantle that controlled the development of the basin in some fundamental ways. The Pannonian basin system is a particularly good candidate for basin analysis, partly because the evolution of this young basin system is relatively simple. In addition, the basin system had one brief period of extension, a simple sedimentary history and a clearly defined regional tectonic setting. The active processes that formed the basin system were short-lived and recent, are essentially finished, and have not been overprinted by subsequent tectonic events. Events within the basin system itself can be spatially and temporally related to regional tectonic events outside of the basin area. The young age of the basin system ensures that many geological and geophysical data such as heat flow, seismic velocities, earthquakes, and so on, provide useful constraints on the processes of basin formation. Because dating is more accurate in young rocks than in older ones, events that are diachronous by as little as one or two million years can be documented in this young basin system, whereas in older basins these events would appear to be contemporaneous everywhere.