Seismicity, fault-plane solutions, and Cenozoic geology are used to infer contemporary west to northwest extension and components of lateral slip between subplates of the western North American plate. Seismicity of the western interior of the Cordillera is characterized by earthquakes that occur in broad zones, up to 150 km wide, in the Nevada and the Intermountain seismic zones. Epicenters are scattered and when accurately located many do not coincide with mapped faults. Focal depths are shallow and seldom exceed 20 km. Secondary seismicity occurs around the margins of the Colorado Plateau, in central Idaho, and in eastern Oregon and Washington. The contemporary strain pattern of the Western United States, as interpreted from fault-plane solutions, suggests that three intraplate lithospheric blocks—the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin-High Lava Plains, and the Northern Rocky Mountains-Columbia Plateau are moving west to northwest as “slivers” between the obliquely converging Pacific and North American plates. Intraplate extension within the Great Basin is primarily accommodated by north-south normal faulting in north-central Nevada and along the Wasatch Front, but significant components of strike-slip faulting occur along active seismic zones in southwestern Nevada and along the northern Intermountain seismic belt in Montana. A thin crust, ~25 km, characterizes the east margin of the Great Basin, with average Pn-velocities of ~7.5 km /s. A crustal low-velocity layer, at 5 to 15 km depth, coincides with the eastern margin of the Great Basin. A thin crust, with an apparent Pn-velocity of ~7.7 km /s, occurs on the northwest margin of the Great Basin and beneath parts of the Oregon-High Lava Plains. The central part of the Great Basin has a thicker crust, ~30 km, and higher Pn-velocities, 7.7 to 7.9 km /s. The Colorado Plateau and the Rocky Mountains have thicker crusts, 40 to 50 km, and Pn-velocities of ~7.8 km/s. An upper-mantle diapir or an upwelling thermal mechanism, facilitated by stress relaxation above the now-truncated Farallon subducting plate, is postulated to have uplifted, extended, and heated the crust of the Great Basin beginning at ~20 m.y. Late Cenozoic centers of volcanism appear to have progressed outward from a northern Great Basin thermal center in two divergent directions—northwesterly along a combined extensional-strike-slip zone of deformation in the High Lava Plains of southeastern Oregon and northeasterly along an extensional zone marked by the Snake River Plain. Lithospheric heating is thought to have produced a broad uplift of the Great Basin with concomitant crustal thinning and diminishing of upper-mantle Pn-velocities. The thermal mechanisms are hypothesized to have produced laterally divergent mantle flow to form symmetric zones of crustal thinning and low Pn-velocities that presently mark the east and west margins of the Great Basin.