Active tectonics of the Alpine--Himalayan belt: the Aegean Sea and surrounding regions

TLDR

The extension is driven by a sinking slab from the Hellenic Arc and by cold mantle blobs detaching from a thickened lithosphere due to thrusting, though the geometry of normal faulting remains poorly explained. Rapid extension now dominates the northern and eastern Aegean, the southern part is relatively inactive, northwestern Greece and Albania exhibit thrusting adjacent to normal faulting, and the crust has thinned to ~30 km in the south, indicating a two‑fold stretch since the Miocene that accounts for the high heat flow.

Abstract

New fault plane solutions, Landsat photographs, and seismic refraction records show that rapid extension is now taking place in the northern and eastern parts of the Aegean sea region. The southern part of the Aegean has also been deformed by normal faulting but is now relatively inactive. In northwestern Greece and Albania there is a band of thrusting near the western coasts adjacent to a band of normal faulting further east. The pre-Miocene geology of the islands in the Aegean closely resembles that of Greece and Turkey, yet seismic refraction shows that the crust is now only about 30 km thick beneath the southern part of the sea, compared with nearly 50 km beneath Greece and western Turkey. These observations suggest that the Aegean has been stretched by a factor of two since the Miocene. This stretching can account for the high heat flow. The sinking slab produced by subduction along the Hellenic Arc may maintain the motions, though the geometry and widespread nature of the normal faulting is not easily explained. The motions in northwestern Greece and Albania cannot be driven in the same way because no slab exists in the area. They may be maintained by blobs of cold mantle detaching from the lower half of the lithosphere, produced by a thermal instability when the lithosphere is thickened by thrusting. Hence generation and destruction of the lower part of the lithosphere may occur beneath deforming continental crust without the production of any oceanic crust.