How ‘hard’ are hard-rock deformations?

The study of soft-rock deformations has received increasing attention during the past two decades, and much progress has been made in the understanding of their genesis. It is also recognized now that soft-rock deformations—which show a wide variety in size and shape—occur frequently in sediments deposited in almost all types of environments. In spite of this, deformations occurring in lithified rocks are still relatively rarely attributed to sedimentary or early-diagenetic processes. Particularly faults in hard rocks are still commonly ascribed to tectonics, commonly without a discussion about a possible non-tectonic origin at a stage that the sediments were still unlithified. Misinterpretations of both the sedimentary and the structural history of hard-rock successions may result from the negligence of a possible soft-sediment origin of specific deformations. It is therefore suggested that a re-evaluation of these histories, keeping the present-day knowledge about soft-sediment deformations in mind, may give new insights into the geological history of numerous sedimentary successions in which the deformations have not been studied from both a sedimentological and a structural point of view.