Northern Cyprus 2017 – Douwe J.J. van Hinsbergen

In November 2017, I conducted a fieldwork in Northern Cyprus with Pete McPhee, to reconstruct the shortening history associated with Africa-Europe collision in the Eastern Mediterranean region. We spent a week working on the fold-thrust belt that includes the narrow, high ridge on northern Cyprus known as the Kyrenia range. Below a photo impression of the trip.

Pete McPhee, PhD student at Utrecht University

…and me

The Kyrenia ranges comprise low-grade metamorphic marbles and greenschists overlain by Cretaceous to Miocene sediments, thrusted in Late Miocene time. The range is a spectacular, narrow ridge along the north coast of Cyprus

The ridge appears to be just a single thrust slice overlain by a complex stratigraphy. It’s only a few km from N to S, but more than 100 km long from E to W.

One of the aims of our structural exercise was to figure out why the dips are so steep. Here you see the top of the marble ridge, likely representing an upper Cretaceous extensional detachment surface along which the metamorphic rocks exhumed

Above the Cretaceous to Eocene stratigraphy of chalks and olistoliths, foreland basin clastics are found with an unconformable contact. Pete is standing on that contact.

To the south of the range, on Central Cyprus, lies the largest part of the fold-thrust belt, hidden in the bonedry, dusty landscape. It comprises clays and turbidites, unconformably overlain by non-tilted Messinian gypsum and deep-marine Pliocene rock

Here a well-exposed example of the steeply tilted Miocene turbiditic sequence

Me, measuring bedding

Pete, documenting

Me, standing in front of a deep-marine Pliocene marl-sapropel sequence

Interestingly, although previously unreported, the Kyrenia range contains an ophiolite sequence – or, rather, a serpentinite melange with oceanic crustal blocks and intrusions, and sediments derived therefrom. We found this in 2014 already, and a paper about it’s (supra-sudbuction zone) geochemistry will be submitted soon.