**1. Introduction**

Plate convergent margins are areas of concentrated lithospheric stress. They include areas of compression accompanied by thrusting, mountain building, and related foreland/forearc basin development, and also areas of strike-slip movement associated with transpressional uplift, transtensional subsidence, or pure strike-slip displacement. The degree of shortening and uplift or extension and subsidence depends on the modes of convergence between oceanic plates, island arcs, and continental crusts. Strike-slip faulting is one of the most important mechanisms of sedimentary basin formation at plate convergent margins, where localized extension can cause topographic depressions. Sedimentary strata deposited in these basins record the history of lithospheric response to the convergence.

Sedimentary successions of archetypal examples of strike-slip basins, such as the Ridge Basin in California, have been characterized in terms of the dominance of axial sediment supply and continuous depocenter migration in a direction opposite to that of the sediment supply [1]. Their basin lengths are typically about three times longer than the basin widths [2]. The Izumi Group of the Cretaceous turbidite successions in southwestern Japan [e.g., 3 and references therein] has the same characteristics in the sedimentary succession as the Ridge Basin, and is therefore considered to contain strata that were deposited in a strike-slip basin. However, the basin geometry is quite different from that of the Ridge Basin, whose shape is more elongated with a length of more than 300 km and a width of less than 20 km, and whose southern margin has been truncated by post-depositional strike-slip fault displacement. Strike-slip basins thus present a wide diversity in terms of their geometry, evolution, and filling processes.

Since many local examples were collected after the 1980s [4], advanced research techniques including subsurface exploration including seismic survey and borehole drilling [e.g., 5], analog experiment [e.g., 6], and numerical simulation [e.g., 7] revealed that basin formation

and filling processes were not simple but variable. In this paper, I try to review some of representative strike-slip basins along convergent margins, especially focusing on basin formation and filling processes, as the first step for comprehensive understandings of the tectono-sedimentary evolution in strike-slip basins.

coefficients of subduction zones favor slip on vertical strike-slip faults rather than on gently

Strike-Slip Basin – Its Configuration and Sedimentary Facies

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/56593

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**Figure 2.** Modern examples of trench-linked strike-slip faults. (A) The Median Tectonic Line (MTL) active fault system in southwestern Japan, related to oblique subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate (PS) along the Nankai Trough (NT). (B) The Great Sumatra Fault system (GSF) along the Java–Sumatra Trench (JST). (C) Strike-slip faults in Alaska. Fault names: DF, Denali; BRF, Boarder Ranges; CSEF, Chugach St. Elias; FF, Fairweather; TF, Transition. (D) The Philippine Fault system (PF). Abbreviations: SSF, Sibuyan Sea Fault; MT, Manila Trench; PT, Philippine Trench; ELT, East Luzon Trough. Plate names: AM, Amur; OK, Okhotsk; PS, Philippine Sea; AU, Australian; SU, Sundaland; NA, North American; PA, Pacific; YMC, Yukutat microcontinent. Black and purple lines are subduction zones and trench-linked strike-slip faults, respectively. All maps were drawn using SRTM and GEBCO with plate boundary data [30]. Blue arrows indicate

the direction and velocity of relative plate motion (mm yr-1) based on [31].

dipping slabs [9].
