Evolution of the Alpine orogenic belts in the Western Mediterranean region as resolved by the kinematics of the Europe-Africa diffuse plate boundary

Abstract

The West European collisional Alpine belts are the result of the inversion, initiated in the middle Cretaceous, of the complex western Neotethys and the Atlantic continental rift domains and closure of remnants of Tethys between the North Africa and European cratons. While the kinematics of Africa relative to Europe is well understood, the kinematics of microplates such as Iberia and Adria within the diffuse collisional plate boundary is still a matter of debate. We review geological and stratigraphic constraints in the peri-Iberia fold-thrust belts and basins to define the deformation history and crustal segmentation of the West European realm. These data are then implemented with other constraints from recently published kinematic and paleogeographic reconstructions to propose a new regional tectonic and kinematic model for Western Europe from the late Permian to recent times. Our model suggests that the pre-collisional extension between Europe and Africa plates was distributed and oblique, hence building discontinuous rift segments between the southern Alpine Tethys and the Central Atlantic. They were characterised by variably extended crust and narrow oceanic domains segmented across transfer structures and micro-continental blocks. The main tectonic structures inherited from the late Variscan orogeny localized deformation associated with rifting and orogenic belts. We show that continental blocks, including the Ebro-Sardinia-Corsica block, have been key in accommodating strike-slip, extension, and contraction in both Iberia and Adria. The definition of a new Ebro-Sardinia-Corsica block allows refining the tectonic relationships between Iberia, Europe and Adria in the Alps. By the Paleogene, the convergence of Africa closed the spatially distributed oceanic domains, except for the Ionian basin. From this time onwards, collision spread over the different continental blocks from Africa to Europe. The area was eventually affected by the West European Rift, in the late Eocene, which may have controlled the opening of the West Mediterranean. The low convergence associated with the collisional evolution of Western Europe permits to resolve the control of the inherited crustal architecture on the distribution of strain in the collision zone, that is otherwise lost in more mature collisional domain such as the Himalaya.