“…The Australian plate is being obliquely subducted beneath Fiordland and is imaged as a steeply dipping, seismically active, high seismic velocity zone to ϳ150 km depth (Davey and Smith, 1983;Eberhart-Phillips and Reyners, 2001). Plate motion of approximately 36 mm/yr is partitioned between subduction and trench-slope convergence (Barnes et al, 2002), Alpine Fault dextral motion of ϳ26 mm/yr (Sutherland, 1994;Sutherland and Norris, 1995;Barnes, 2001), and distributed convergence across the 300 km width of South Island (Norris, 1979;Walcott, 1998). Estimates of when the Australian plate started to be subducted vary from 7 to 14 Myr (Davey and Smith, 1983;Walcott, 1998;House et al, 2002) and regional geology shows that the Fiordland region has experienced a progressively increasing convergence rate since 20 -30 Myr (Turnbull and Uruski, 1993).…”