Talk:Shear (geology)

Article currently about two separate topics

Currently this article covers two distinct (if related) topics and mixes them up. There is shear, as used in the terms 'pure shear' and 'simple shear', which simply refers to any plastic deformation, and these terms are not restricted to geology. Then there are localised tabular zones of deformation, generally known as 'shear zones', although sometimes the 'zone' bit is dropped as in 'Riedel shear'. Similar structures do occur in other sciences, materials science, soil science and glaciology to name a few, but they are on a very small scale in comparison to shear zones that in some cases accommodate 10s of km of displacement, so there is definite need for a specific geology article. I will check with existing articles on plastic deformation to see if the general usage of the term needs to be covered here at all. My final aim would be to move this article to 'Shear zone', which is the most commonly used term and currently redirects here. Any thoughts? Mikenorton (talk) 09:28, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Your approach sounds good to me. I agree that shear is a physical process of wider significance than geology alone and I think the theoretical aspects would be better included in e.g. a physics or material science article. I prefer to see the geological article as "shear zone" because my experience has been that when geologists use "shear" as a noun it is almost always shorthand for "shear zone". GeoWriter (talk) 10:30, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

We now have a shear zone article, but the problems with this one remain. I am tempted to simply redirect this article to 'shear zone' as the current version is both imprecise and inaccurate, particularly in the lede, and I see no easy way to fix it in its current form. Mikenorton (talk) 14:17, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Proposed redirect to 'Shear zone'

I propose redirecting this page to shear zone, for the reasons stated in the previous section. Obviously I will need to check first that there is nothing in this article that could usefully be added to that article. Mikenorton (talk) 10:01, 14 August 2011 (UTC)