摘要：The year 2020 will long be recognised as a period of sadness and frustration for academics worldwide, given the catastrophic impact that the spread of novel coronavirus “2019-nCoV” – or COVID-19 – has had on research and teaching activities, as well as in their personal lives. This Special Issue was designed to represent an avenue for dissemination of many studies presented at the September 2019 Geological Society of America session T23, ‘Metamorphism and Orogenesis at Convergent Plate Margins’, convened by Richard Palin and Kyle Ashley. Many geologists at all career stages attended this session and presented work that was in different stages of completion; however, just a few months later, the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the globe applied sudden brakes to many of these partially completed projects. Several researchers who expressed interest in contributing to this Special Issue were forced to withdraw, either due to new responsibilities at home, laboratory closures at their places of work, or restrictions halting domestic or international travel. We appreciate that these changes in circumstance have resulted in fewer than expected contributions to this Special Issue, and warmly thank the authors who did manage to overcome these hurdles and produce an excellent set of papers. We hope that the academic world will be able to recover from the impact of COVID-19 so that we can – as a community – move forward once again to break new ground in our understanding of this dynamic and highly unpredictable natural world.
