摘要：Orogenic belts should be studied from the outside inwards: that was drummed into me at McMaster University by Vint Gwinn, a young American sedi- mentary and structural geologist with oil industry experience. It was 1963 and he was putting the finishing touch- es on a paper, still cited today, proving that thin-skinned thrusts underlie the Central Appalachian Plateau and northwestern Valley and Ridge, where no fault breaks the surface (Gwinn 1964). Gwinn was informal yet pas- sionate, invoking sedimentary succes- sions in orogenic forelands as the best records of subsidence and sedimenta- tion related to orogenesis, as controls on the trajectories of faults and related folds, and as horizons for tracking deformation. Gwinn’s course primed me to appreciate graduate school in the Central Appalachians.
