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 FourierUniversity (Grenoble, France) under the supervision of Prof. Ritske Huismans, Prof. Peter vander Beek and Prof. Haakon Fossen. The project started in September 2009 and was funded bythe Norwegian Research Council through the Norwegian component of the European ScienceFoundation Eurocore TOPO-Europe project PyrTec. The computationally intensive numericalmodeling 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 dissertationsin natural sciences, where the main body of the thesis consists of research papers eitherpublished, submitted or about to be submitted to international peer-reviewed journals. Thepresent thesis comprises three papers: Paper 1 has been accepted for publication by the AGUjournal Tectonics; Paper 2 has been submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters; andPaper 3 has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The three research papersare preceded by an Introductory Chapter that details the general background and aims of theproject, synthesizes its outcome, and outlines prospects for future work. An authorshipstatement provides an overview of the contribution of each author to this collaborativeresearch work.