A case of Distributed Continental Collision: Late Cretaceous Intraplate Shortening from Central Europe to North Africa

Intraplate thrusting and basin inversion affected west-central Europe in Late Cretaceous time. The timing of this event is fairly well constrained between c. 90 and 65 Ma. The dominantly NW-trending European intraplate structures were often interpreted to have been dextrally transpressive, reflecting a northward push induced by the early collision of the Adria microplate with Europe's southern margin. However, many fault kinematic and other structural data from central Europe indicate dip-slip contraction essentially perpendicular to the main faults, suggesting a push from the southwest. In addition, recent plate reconstructions of the Mediterranean around 85 Ma place Adria far to the southeast and roughly along strike of the central European intraplate structures. The early Alpine nappe stack on Adria's leading edge was still separated from Europe by subducting oceanic lithosphere and had entered a phase of extension after the first orogenic event. All this makes Alpine collision an unlikely cause for intraplate thrusting in Europe. Rather, the timing, kinematics and location of structures suggest that intraplate shortening in Europe was a direct effect of convergence with the Iberian and African plates, with stresses transmitted across the Azores-Gibraltar fracture zone. This hypothesis is supported by structures of Late Cretaceous age indicating SW-NE to S-N shortening in France, Spain (particularly the onset of convergence in the Pyrenees) and northwestern Africa. In contrast to other examples such as the Laramides, intraplate thrusting in this case was not a foreland phenomenon related to a coeval orogen. It does not reflect a transition from subduction to continental collision, but the beginning of convergence across two former transform boundaries. This system which included no strongly thickened and weakened crust was mostly governed by far-field stresses and therefore responded rapidly to plate reorganizations. Specifically, the onset of thrusting coincided with Africa's northeast turn after an extended period of SE-directed transform motion along Europe. Thrusting terminated in mid-Paleocene time when Africa-Europe convergence slowed drastically due to transtensional rifting in the North Atlantic (Nielsen et al., Nature 450, 2007).