The Pyrenees: from salt tectonics and hyperextension to compression
fieldtrip by request
by Jaume Vergés and Lluís Ardèvol
The Pyrenees are an Alpine fold-thrust belt formed during the Late Cretaceous–early Miocene as the result of south-to-north continental collision of the Iberian and European plates. The Pyrenean orogeny inverted a precursor rift, that was an east-west-trending aborted branch of the Mid Atlantic spreading ridge that opened from the Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, connecting the Atlantic and the Tethys oceans. A cross section through the central Pyrenees has a fan like geometry with an axial antiformal stack of Variscan basement rocks flanked by both northward- and southward-directed cover thrust sheets detached above Triassic salt, expression of precursor salt-related minibasins.