The aetiology of the neotectonic evolution of Turkey
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The aetiology of the neotectonic evolution of Turkey A. M. Celâl Şengör1,2 · Müge Yazıcı2 Received: 10 June 2020 / Revised: 7 October 2020 / Accepted: 16 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The neotectonics of Turkey comprises a time slice since about the end of the Oligocene and has been dominated by the shortening of Eastern Turkey, which created the Turkish–Iranian high plateau, extension in western Turkey, which created the Aegean Sea and the basin-and-range system of western Anatolia and the escape westward from the converging jaws of Arabia and Eurasia along the North and East Anatolian transform faults onto the Hellenic/Cypriot subduction zone. The escape of Turkey along the North and East Anatolian Faults began when eastern Turkey was still at subsea level, while western Turkey was a high plateau of some 3 km elevation. These inferences make it unlikely that the gravitational potential of the Turkish–Iranian Plateau initiated the escape. The pull of the Hellenic/Cypriot subduction system seems influential in western Turkey, but not necessarily in creating the escape regime. The high topography in eastern Turkey developed gradually between the Serravallian and the present coevally as western Turkey lost elevation, which probably aided in accelerating the rate of the escape. Keywords Escape tectonics · Thin-sheet model of continental deformation · Turkey · North Anatolian fault · Neotectonics
1 Introduction The tectonics of the earth is explained by the movement of lithospheric plates, which create mobile belts along their boundaries (Wilson 1965). The idea of mobile belts implies that the earth’s lithosphere is composed of a finite number of plates, which move with respect to each other along three kinds of boundaries forming mobile belts. Plates have been assumed to be torsionally rigid spherical caps and have narrow boundaries where almost all the deformation localized, particularly in the oceanic lithosphere. Torsional rigidity of the plates means that the distance between two points within the same plate and their positions with respect to one another do not change with time. In other words, there is no significant deformation within them. However, the distribution of global seismicity has long shown that although major deformations are localised along the narrow plate boundaries, much distortion is distributed within a much wider plate * A. M. Celâl Şengör [email protected] 1
İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Avrasya Yerbilimleri Enstitüsü, 34469 Maslak, İstanbul, Turkey
Maden Fakltesi, Jeoloji Mühendisliği Bölümü, İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, İstanbul, Turkey
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boundary zone as well particularly in continental collisional zones (Burke et al. 1980; Wiens et al. 1986; Gordon 1998; Storti et al. 2003; Şengör and Zabcı 2019). One of the best examples of such wide and diffuse collisional boundaries is the Alpide plate boundary zone. Interaction between the Indian, Arabian, Eurasian and African plates shapes the complex tectonic setting of this zone includi
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