Geophysical constraints on the nature of geological domains of continental rifted margins

Memoria de tesis doctoral presentada por Irene Merino Pérez para obtener el título de Doctora en Ciències de la Terra por la Universitat de Barcelona (UB), realizada bajo la dirección del Dr. César Rodríguez Ranero y del Dr. alentí Sallarès Casas del Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC).-- 217 pages, figures, tables, appendixes
In this PhD work, I carried out a geophysical and geological study of two classical examples of rifted continental margins: the Gulf of Lions, located in the Western Mediterranean, and the Tagus Abyssal Plain, located in the West Iberia margin. Despite the numerous previous studies performed in these two margins, there is an open debate on their crustal structure and on the processes that led to their formation. My study aims to 1) determining the nature of rocks forming the main geological domains of the basin based on a new methodological approach, 2) defining the tectonic structure of the basement and 3) placing constrains and discussing the kinematics and tectonic and magmatic mechanisms involved in the formation of these basins. To study the Gulf of Lions and Ligurian basin, I used a geophysical data set acquired during the SARDINIA-2006 survey. It was conducted on board the French R/V L’Atalante, by the L'Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (Ifremer) (France). In particular, I used seismic records along three spatially consecutive Multi-Channel Seismic (MCS) lines and a collocated Wide-Angle Seismic (WAS) profile recorded by a set of Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) during the shooting of the MCS lines. Altogether, these lines cover a 467-km-long seismic transect that runs NW-SE across the Gulf of Lions until the central part of the Liguro-Provençal basin. [...]
The author of this thesis has benefited from a four-year “Formación de Personal Investigador” (FPI) fellowship (reference BES-2016-077786) in the framework of the FRAME project (reference CTM2015-71766-R), funded by the “Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion” (MICINN) between 2016 and 2021. The author carried out, within the framework of the FPI, a 3 months-stay at the Geophysics Section of the DIAS Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (Dublin, Ireland). For the first part of this thesis, the seismic data used in this study was collected by French R/V L’Atalante in 2006. We do not use any new data. All data come from previously published sources, and are available through (Gallier et al., 2009) and (Moulin et al., 2015). For the second part of the thesis, the data used was acquired within the framework of the FRAME project (reference CTM2015-71766-R) onboard of the R/V Sarmiento de Gamboa. This work was carried out within the Grup de Recerca Consolidat de la Generalitat de Catalunya Barcelona Centre for Subsurface Imaging (B-CSI) (2014SGR940). The group computer and software facilities have been largely funded with the projects Kaleidoscope, CO-DOS, Geomargen-2, Geomargen-3, Geomargen-4, Geomargen-5, Geomargen-6, and CODOS-Phase2 funded by Repsol