The creation, recycling, and maintenance of continental lithosphere and its mainly stable cratonic cores have long been debated. I discuss our recent imaging work for North America and strive to put this in context of the Tibet/East Asia setting, contrasting the Farallon and Tethyan driven tectonic systems, as well as their aftermath as is accessible by current tomographic imaging.

Thorsten Becker is appointed as a Distinguished Chair in Geophysics at the Jackson School of Geosciences and as faculty associate of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences at UT Austin. His research interests are in geodynamics and seismology, focusing on how planets' interior and surface systems have co-evolved. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, member of the Academia Europaea, and recipient of IUGG's Evgueni Burov and the European Geoscience Union's Augustus Love medals.