Abstract

This meeting took place at Burlington House on 14 and 15 June 1989. Until recently a specialist structural geology meeting on a theme such as this would have been solely the preserve of the Tectonic Studies Group. There is, however, currently much encouraging collaboration between industry and academia on research into all aspects of extensional faulting and thus this meeting was held under the joint aegis of the Petroleum Group and Tectonic Studies Group. The hope that such a meeting would draw participation from industry and academia was fulfilled, with the number of talks presented and the overall attendance dividing roughly equally between these two groups of Earth scientists. The programme included 31 papers and a number of poster displays; nearly 200 people attended.

Ultimately the proceedings of the meeting will, it k hoped, appear as a Special Publication of the Geological Society. The intention of this report is therefore not to review each contribution in turn, but rather to synthesize the main themes and conclusions of the meeting, in order that they should be disseminated into the Earth sciences community as rapidly as possible and prior to any future volume.

The recent involvement of industry in published basin analysis studies has resulted in an increase in the availability of seismic reflection data to all Earth scientists. A major emphasis at the meeting was therefore placed on what can be learnt about normal fault geometry from seismic reflection data. This main theme was amply supported by papers based on field