This includes measurement or calculation of the stress- and strain fields on Earth’s surface and the rheologies of the crust, mantle, lithosphere and asthenosphere.
[2] These govern processes on local and regional scales and at structural boundaries, such as the destruction of continental crust (e.g. gravitational instability) and oceanic crust (e.g. subduction), convection in the Earth's mantle (availability of melts), the course of continental drift, and second-order effects of plate tectonics such as thermal contraction of the lithosphere.
According to the AGU website (https://tectonophysics.agu.org/agu-100/section-history/), using the words from Norman Bowen, the main goal of the tectonophysics section was to “designate this new borderline field between geophysics, physics and geology … for the solution of problems of tectonics.” Consequently, the claim below that the term was defined in 1954 by Gzolvskii is clearly incorrect.
Tectonophysics was defined as a field in 1954 when Mikhail Vladimirovich Gzovskii published three papers in the journal Izvestiya Akad.
He defined the main goals of tectonophysical research to be study of the mechanisms of folding and faulting as well as large structural units of the Earth's crust.