This chapter starts with the introduction of heat conduction and its controlling parameters. It then describes the control of thermal regimes of transform margins and strike-slip terrains by a number of material parameters such as specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and radioactive heat production rate, which, together with their controlling factors, are described individually.

This chapter describes the effect of erosion and deposition on the thermal regimes of strike-slip and pull-apart terrains, and transform margins. It defines the significant deposition rate, which is faster than 0.1 mmyr–1, as exerting a noticeable cooling effect on the surface heat flow while a significant erosional rate has the opposite effect, resulting in advection of hotter material toward the surface. It support this discussion with examples from the East Slovakian and Vienna pull-apart basins in the Western Carpathians, Wasatch normal fault example from Utah, and offshore North Gabon and East Indian examples.

The chapter defines the top seal as a transient feature on the geological timescale. It divides seals into lithological and fault seals. The chapter goes through the physical apparatus controlling the behavior of various types of seals, all the main mechanisms involved together with their controlling factors, and finishes with an attempt to use case strike-slip and transform regions for describing the seals of these settings in a systematic way, trying to tie their variability to variations in the structural architecture of their respective settings.

This chapter discusses the importance of fluid flow mechanisms described in Chapter 8 in controlling the local thermal regime of the strike-slip terrains and transform margins (i.e., determining the proportion of heat convection to heat conduction). It continues with an argument about how important it is to resolve the distribution of the primary fluid reservoirs in the system, fluid sources and sinks, fluid migration pathways, and the associated migration rates for the construction of a local quantitative thermal model or at least the appropriate use of a known analog in the qualitative way. This chapter places the fluid flow mechanisms described in Chapter 8 in the context of different tectonic settings and discusses how convective heat transfer controls their thermal regimes. It starts with discussion of oceanic and continental transforms, then pull-apart terrains, and ends with known active geothermal fields located in strike-slip settings and their characteristics.

This chapter starts with characteristics of matrix- and fracture-controlled reservoirs. Building upon Chapter 7, it focuses on a detailed discussion of depositional environments of strike-slip terrains and transform margins in an attempt to understand their potential for developing reservoirs capable of hosting hydrocarbons. The discussion includes details from several natural laboratories, such as the Vienna Basin in Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, representing the continental strike-slip settings and Equatorial Atlantic and Guyana–Suriname regions representing transform margins. The knowledge from these examples is combined with other case studies from the literature on these two tectonic settings. Although every margin and basin is unique, this chapter tries to explore the commonality within continental strike-slip and transform margin settings. This chapter focuses on their main depositional trends and their role in developing specific characteristic types of reservoirs to form a framework that can be applied to other continental strike-slip terrains and transform margins.