摘要：One of the major challenges in Geoscience is to understand how the formation and evolution of the Earth System are governed by timescales e that is, how the various geological processes that continue to contribute to its present-day structure and composition operated in the deep past. The traditional view of such processes refers to events that occur at immense spatial scales and over hundreds of millions of years, constrained in most cases by the ages of rocks determined using isotopic dating methods or the fossil record. However, the modern view of geological processes has increasingly acknowledged that their durations can be significantly shorter than previously thought possible, or indeed detectable without recent analytical innovations. Earthquakes are a prime example of rapid, high energy and episodic events that have a profound effect on subsequent processes such as metamorphism, fluid transport, and ore formation e the evidence of which is written in microstructures, compositional zoning, and P-T records. Experimental studies have also revealed that the reaction rates between fluids and rocks can be extremely rapid relative to geological timescales. This has led to the notion that geological processes are not necessarily continuous over millions of years but may, in fact, be sporadic, with long periods where essentially no reactions take place punctuated by periods of intense activity.
