Dipartimento di Scienze Geologiche, Ambientali e Marine, Università di Trieste

On the Ionian Sea coast of southern Italy, spanning the transition from the Calabrian Arc to the Apennines, NE-directed motion of the thin-skinned frontal thrust belt of the Apennines toward the Apulian foreland reportedly ceased during the Early-Middle Pleistocene. The submarine extension of the frontal thrust belt is represented by the Amendolara ridge, which stretches for over 80 km to the SE beneath the Taranto Gulf. High-resolution marine geophysical data collected on the Amendolara ridge during the TEATIOCA_2011 cruise provided unequivocal constraints to assert active fault-related fold growth. Single-channel seismic (sparker) and acoustic CHIRP profiles, corroborated by multibeam mapping and shallow coring, form the novel dataset to constrain the near-bottom evolution. The new data were benchmarked to the crustal geometry by means of interpretation of existing multichannel seismic profiles.

The present study is focused on a morphometric analysis of high resolution multibeam data (10m, 5m and, locally, 2m resolution), that were acquired during the oceanographic TEATIOCA 2011 campaign along a sector of the Ionian margin of northern Calabria. The integration of morphometric analysis with sparker and chirp data allowed to unveil basic but robust information about: 1. hierarchy of the fault systems controlling the bathymetric evolution; 2. the interplay between tectonic and erosional processes in sea-floor modeling; 3. uplift rates; 4. tilting processes.