Abstract
During the Cenozoic, the Western Mediterranean region has experienced a complex subduction history which involved the destruction of the Late Triassic/Jurassic Ligurian ocean and the West Alpine-Tethys. Lithosphere remnants of this evolution have been detected in the upper mantle by seismic tomography imaging. However, no general consensus exists on the interpretation of these remnants/slabs in the context of Ligurian ocean and West Alpine-Tethys subduction. In this paper we search for subduction remnants of the entire Cenozoic evolution in the recent global tomography model of Bijwaard and Spakman (2000) and compare these tomography results and our interpretations with those obtained in previous studies. Next, we present an analysis of imaged mantle structure in the context of the tectonic evolution of the Western Mediterranean during the Cenozoic. Our analysis leads to the following main results:
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Spakman, W., Wortel, R. (2004). A Tomographic View on Western Mediterranean Geodynamics. In: Cavazza, W., Roure, F., Spakman, W., Stampfli, G.M., Ziegler, P.A. (eds) The TRANSMED Atlas. The Mediterranean Region from Crust to Mantle. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18919-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18919-7_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-62355-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18919-7
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