Print this pageCenozoic Exhumation of the Southern British Isles
Simon P. Holford1, Richard Hillis1, Paul F. Green2, Tony Doré3, Robert Gatliff4, Martyn Stoker4, Ken Thomson5, Jonathan Turner5, John Underhill6, and Gareth Williams7
1Australian School of Petroleum, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
2Geotrack International Pty Ltd, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
3Statoil UK Ltd, London, United Kingdom
4British Geological Survey, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
5School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
6School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
7British Geological Survey, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Outcropping rocks across southern Britain were exhumed from up to 2.5 km depth during Cenozoic times. This has been widely attributed to Paleocene regional uplift resulting from igneous underplating related to the Iceland mantle plume. Our compilation of paleothermal and compaction data reveal spatial and temporal patterns of exhumation showing little correspondence with the postulated influence of underplating, instead being dominated by kilometer-scale variations across Cenozoic compressional structures, which in several basins are demonstrably of Neogene age. We propose that crustal compression, due to plate boundary forces transmitted into the plate interior, was the major cause of Cenozoic uplift in southern Britain, witnessing a high strength crust in western Europe.
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