Late Quaternary coastal uplift of southwestern Sicily, central Mediterranean sea

Mapping and luminescence aging of raised marine terraces and aeolian ridges along an -90 km coastal stretch in southwestern Sicily provide the first quantitative assessment of vertical tectonic deformation in this region, which spans the frontal part of an active thrust belt. We recognized a staircase of eleven terraces and nine related aeolian ridges. The elevation profile of terraces parallel to the coast shows a >90 km long bell-shaped pattern, onto which shorter-wavelength (similar to 10 km long) undulations are superimposed. Luminescence ages from terraced beach deposits and aeolian sediments constrain the position of paleoshorelines formed during MIS 5e, 7a and 7c, with a maximum uplift rate of similar to 0.75 mm/a, and indicate a late Middle-Late Pleistocene (80-400 Ica) age for the sequence of terraces. The elevation of Lower Pleistocene morpho-depositional markers points that uplift may have occurred at similar rates at the beginning of the Early Pleistocene, but almost zeroed between similar to 1.5 and 0.4 Ma before the recent renewal. The uneven elevation of Middle-Upper Pleistocene paleoshorelines observed moving along the coast documents that uplift embeds both a regional and a local component. The regional, symmetric bellshaped uplift is related to involvement in the thrust belt of thicker crustal portions of the northern African continental margin. The short-wavelength undulations represent the local component and correspond to actively growing bedrock folds. The present study contributes to unravel the different spatial and temporal scales of deformation processes at a collisional margin. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Mapping and luminescence aging of raised marine terraces and aeolian ridges along a 90 km coastal stretch in southwestern Sicily provide the first quantitative assessment of vertical tectonic deformation in this region. The results demonstrate that the uplift includes a regional component related to the involvement of thicker crustal portions of the northern African continental margin in the thrust belt, and a local component corresponding to actively growing bedrock folds.