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EUROPROBE PROJECTS
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URALIDES:
A key to Understanding Collisional Orogeny |
The Uralide orogen is one of Earth’s great
structural discontinuities. It is the geographic and geological divide between Europe and
Asia.Wedged between the East-European Craton to the west and the Angara Craton to the
east, the Uralides include a 2500-km-long suture zone that juxta-poses a collage of
accreted oceanic, island arc and microcontinental terranes against a west-vergent thrust
stack of foreland basin and continental margin rocks.
The URALIDES project comprises a coordinated,interdisciplinary
investigation into the nature and history of the Uralide orogen. Comprehensive time and
3-D space analyses will improve our understanding of the orogen’s structure and
tectonic evolution and provide key information on the development and preservation of
mountain roots. A wide range of geological, geophysical, geochronological and geochemical
research is underway or planned.
A major objective of EUROPROBE’S URALIDES Project is a multidisciplinary
investigation into the structure and evolution of the Uralide orogen. In addition
to resolving key problems related to the general architecture and formation of the orogen
itself and to the assembly of Pangaea, several other world-class issues will be addressed,
as follows:
Studies of anomalously thick crust along the axis of the orogen may yield
clues as to how mountain roots are generated and preserved.
Exceptionally well-preserved ophiolites and volcanic-arc assemblages,
which extend throughout the length of the mountain belt, allow processes associated with
Palaeozoic ocean crust formation and subduction to be explored.
Mechanisms that control the exhumation of crustal material from great
depth (50-80 km) will be examined through investigations of spectacular outcrops of high
pressure metamorphic rocks.
The well-documented peneplanation of the mountain belt by the Jurassic and
the relatively recent anomalous uplift history lend the Uralides to studies of
post-orogenic exhumation and uplift mechanisms.
Comparison of seismic reflection data with very deep borehole information
(current depth of the superdeep Uralian borehole is 5.3 km; target depth is 15 km) should
provide new con-straints on the origin of seismic reflections from crystalline crust.
Research institutes in Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA are collaborating with Russian
colleagues in the URALIDES Project. Protocols of agreement have been signed
between several research institutions from both east and west; in particular, between
EUROPROBE and the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Committee for Geology.
There are also agreements on specific collaborative projects, e.g. between EUROPROBE,
DEKORP (Germany), ICTJA (Spain), INSTOC (USA), and SPETZGEOFIZIKA (Russia) for the
acquisition,
processing and interpretation of the 1995 deep seismic reflection profile across the
southern Urals.
Get the URALIDES text and figures out of the EUROPROBE 1996
publication by clicking on the corresponding text.
Click on the figure and see the image enlarged
PDF-viewers can be obtained through
the net for different operating systems.
For more information please contact the project
leader:
Prof. Andrés Pérez-Estaún
Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera
C.S.I.C.
c/. Lluís Solé i Sabarís s/n
E-08028 BARCELONA
SPAIN
Tel: +34-3/490 05 52
Fax: +34-3/411 00 12
E-mail: andres@ija.csic.es
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