Active tectonics of the offshore North Tunisian continental margin

Abstract

Northern Tunisia has a complex and poorly studied tectonic evolution. Particularly, the offshore sector of the continental margin in northern Tunisia comprised between Sicily and Sardinia is a poorly explored area within the Mediterranean Sea and very few works and datasets have been published until now. In order to study the current tectonic activity of the area we use a large dataset from two geophysical cruises that collected a high-resolution bathymetric map covering ~15,600 km2 and around 12,000 km of parametric sub-bottom profiles. We use the data for a geomorphological, seismostratigraphical and structural analysis. We find active faulting mainly affecting the north-easternmost sector of the studied region. Active faulting displays a transpressive regime with NE-SW oriented left-lateral strike slip faults that matches with the current NW-SE convergence between Nubia and Eurasia and differs from the pattern observed at the neighbour areas of northern Algeria and northern Sicily