Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed the article as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The lithosphere is the rigid outer layer of the Earth--the crust and upper mantle. Lithospheric deformation describes the changes that happen in the lithosphere due to plate tectonics. It's difficult to study, because these processes occur below the surface, and we're only just beginning to understand how it works. An analogy would be trying to reconstruct a traffic accident by examining the crumple zone on a car.