Phanerozoic Tectonic History of the Lands Bordering the Southeastern Mediterranean Basin

Z. Garfunkel, B. Derin

The part of the Arabo-African continental mass bordering the southeastern Mediterranean was stabilized by the Pan-African orogeny in the Early Cambrian. During most of the Phanerozoic it was a stable platform on which an extensive blanket of mature sediments accumulated in several phases of deposition, separated by periods of extensive erosion and controlled by regional tectonism and worldwide changes in sea level. The platform history comprises several stages with different tectonic regimes. During most of the Paleozoic the area was within Gondwanaland, some distance from any continental margin, and its long-wavelength vertical motions were not visibly related to the Mesozoic continental margin. After Late Permian time the pattern of vertical motions was characterized by subsidence increasing toward the Mesozoic continental margin. However, tectonism, volcanism, and deep-water sedimentation associated with its shaping are known only from Middle Triassic and early Liassic times when the Levant and the Zagros margins strongly subsided; in Egypt important subsidence began later. In Late Jurassic time the Levant basin was already about 2 km deep; farther west, deep-water conditions existed at least from the Early Cretaceous. A latest Jurassic-earliest Cretaceous hot spot produced widespread magmatism, uplifting, and erosion in the lands bordering the Levant basin, temporarily interrupting the regional subsidence. The Senonian plate convergence along the Alpine foldbelt produced mild compressional and shearing deformation in the northeast-southwest-trending S rian arc, which modulated the sedimentation on the platform and along the continental margin. Following the Neogene, the area was affected by still-active rifting and continental breakup associated with widespread magmatism and uplifting which considerably modified the older regional structure.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91032©1988 Mediterranean Basins Conference and Exhibition, Nice, France, 25-28 September 1988.