Transform fault

A strike-slip plate boundary where two plates slide horizontally past each other, neither creating nor destroying lithosphere.

Strike-slip fault: A fault where rock blocks move horizontally past each other, with little vertical motion. The faulting style that defines transform motion.
Divergent boundary: A plate boundary where plates move apart and new crust is created. Transforms conserve crust; spreading boundaries create it.
Dead Sea Transform: The left-lateral transform linking the East African Rift to the Zagros convergence. A continental transform that opened the Dead Sea pull-apart basin.
J. Tuzo Wilson: Canadian geophysicist who proposed transform faults in 1965 and founded hotspot theory. Named and explained the new boundary type that earlier theories lacked.
1906 San Francisco earthquake: The magnitude ~7.9 rupture on the San Andreas Fault that destroyed much of San Francisco. The disaster that first taught geologists how a transform stores and releases strain.
Mid-ocean ridge: Undersea mountain chain where new oceanic crust forms as plates diverge. Transforms offset ridge segments into a staircase of spreading and sliding.
Convergent boundary: A boundary where plates collide, producing subduction or collision belts. The destructive counterpart to the transform's conservative sliding.
Alpine Fault: New Zealand's onshore transform with major right-lateral and vertical slip, raising the Southern Alps. Shows transform motion combining strike-slip with uplift.
Seafloor spreading: The 1960s finding that oceanic crust forms at ridges and spreads outward. The discovery whose odd ridge offsets turned out to be transforms.
Paleoseismology: The study of prehistoric earthquakes from offset strata, trenches and dated deposits. The method used to read recurrence intervals from transform fault scarps.

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