ALBORAN SEA LATE CENOZOIC TECTONIC AND STRATIGRAPHIC EVOLUTION

Analysis of airgun seismic profiles from the Alboran Sea reveals a complex morphostructure with margins, basins, and structural highs. North of the Alboran Ridge, south-facing margins have a passive style of evolution, with thick progradational sequences of post-Messinian deposits, whereas north-facing margins are tectonized along structural highs with reduced sediment cover. Basins are extensional features developed since the Early Miocene by mechanisms of tectonic escape and pull-apart, under generalized northwest-southeast to north-south compression. Depositional sequences in this semi-land-locked sea were controlled by the local tectonism and influenced by global sea-level oscillations.