The research presented in this thesis was conducted at the Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen (Norway), and in parallel at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble, France) under the supervision of Prof. Ritske Huismans, Prof. Peter van der Beek and Prof. Haakon Fossen. The project started in September 2009 and was funded by the Norwegian Research Council through the Norwegian component of the European Science Foundation Eurocore TOPO-Europe project PyrTec. The computationally intensive numerical modeling was carried out on the University of Bergen supercomputers Fimm and Hexagon, maintained by the Bergen Center of Computational Science. The thesis is structured in accordance with the Norwegian guidelines for doctoral dissertations in natural sciences, where the main body of the thesis consists of research papers either published, submitted or about to be submitted to international peer-reviewed journals. The present thesis comprises three papers: Paper 1 has been accepted for publication by the AGU journal Tectonics; Paper 2 has been submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters; and Paper 3 has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The three research papers are preceded by an Introductory Chapter that details the general background and aims of the project, synthesizes its outcome, and outlines prospects for future work. An authorship statement provides an overview of the contribution of each author to this collaborative research work.