A first coincident normal-incidence and wide-angle approach to studying the extending Aegean crust

The Aegean Sea is a broad area of submerged continental crust undergoing active extension to varying degrees. A combined near-normal incidence and wide-angle seismic recording programme was conducted in the western Aegean Sea in 1993, with the principal objective of testing the popular hypothesis that lower crustal deformation (particularily extension) is expressed as a seismically “layered lower crust” (LLC). Across the southern margin of the Cretan trough (i.e. North Cretan offshore margin), a LLC was indicated by wide-angle arrivals that was not apparent on either the coincident near-normal-in-cidence profile or on older low-frequency refraction records. North of the northern margin of the Cretan Trough, beneath the Cyclades, a domain of strong reflectivity is recorded from the middle to lower crust. Here, the near-normal incidence sections also show this typical LLC reflectivity. On the wide-angle sections, a distinct interface is suggested in addition, at a larger depth than that previously assumed for the Moho discontinuity. The structural images and interpretations derived from the new seismic data so far do not clearly support either a pure-shear crustal stretching or an asymmetric simple-shear extension model for the Aegean Sea. Our results appear to be consistent with a tectonic model, where middle crust mobilised by flow coincides spatially with upper crust that has been thinned by active extension of an orogenically thickened crust and expressed near the surface as an exhumed metamorphic core complex.