Structural inversion and its controls : examples from the Alpine foreland and the French Alps

Positive structural inversion involves the uplift of rocks on the hanging-walls of faults, by dip slip or oblique slip movements. Controlling factors include the strike and dip of the earlier normal faults, the type of normal faults — whether they were listric or rotated blocks, the time lapsed since extension and the amount of contraction relative to extension. Steeply dipping faults are difficult to invert by dip slip movements; they form buttresses to displacement on both cover detachments and on deeper level but gently inclined basement faults. The decrease in displacement on the hanging-walls of such steep buttresses leads to the generation of layer parallel shortening, gentle to tight folds — depending on the amount of contractional displacement, back-folds and back-thrust systems, and short-cut thrust geometries — where the contractional fault slices across the footwall of the earlier normal fault to enclose a “floating horse”. However, early steeply dipping normal faults readily form obliq...