Morphologic and Morphotectonic Syntheses of the Mediterranean Sea

Jean Mascle, Georges Mascle, and Laetitia Brosolo

We present and discuss two recent syntheses of the Mediterranean Sea we recently compiled under Arcgis environment.

- The first one concerns the morpho-bathymetry of the Mediterranean Sea. It has been constructed using DTMs (at 500 m grid) from swath bathymetric data previously provided by various academic institutions, and completed by unpublished data, including a few data sets extracted from 3D seismic blocks provided by some oil companies. This high-resolution data set has been mixed with various DTMs (Gulf of Biscay, Gulf of Cadiz, Black Sea); areas not yet covered by swath bathymetry mapping, or for which the data were not yet made available, have been completed by a general DTM (at 1500m grid) extracted from GEBCO.

Such a detailed synthesis reveals many, particularly well imprinted, morphological features and can thus be used to illustrate the various and interfering active geological processes operating on the Mediterranean deep sea floor, as well as to select areas of interest for further academic and industry researches, particularly in the deep and ultra-deep offshore.

- The second synthesis is, to our knowledge, the first attempt ever made to map several overall geological/geophysical characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea within its surrounding geological framework.

On land, the geology has tentatively been reduced to twelve mains units relative to the alpine evolution of the area. At sea, the superposition of more than twenty distinct layers, mapped in an Arcgis environment, illustrate most of the main crustal, structural, sedimentary and geochemical particularities of the Mediterranean Sea and stress the strong contrast between the old, Mesozoic, Eastern Mediterranean Sea basins, chiefly submitted to compression, and the much younger, chiefly Neogene, Western Mediterranean basins resulting mainly from back-arc type extensional mechanisms.

The two resulting syntheses are presently available as hard (paper) copies. Digital copies may be available on specific requests.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90161©2013 AAPG European Regional Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 8-10 April 2013