Passive-roof duplexes accommodate shortening at the mountain front of many fold-and-thrust belts worldwide.These structures typically manifest at the surface by hinterland-verging backthrusts that decouple thin-skinne...Passive-roof duplexes accommodate shortening at the mountain front of many fold-and-thrust belts worldwide.These structures typically manifest at the surface by hinterland-verging backthrusts that decouple thin-skinned thrust sheets from underlying foreland-verging duplexes.Although the main fac-tors controlling the development of passive-roof duplexes have mostly been identified,some of their intrinsic characteristics are still poorly defined.These relate to their spatio-temporal relationships to thrust faults located further inland in orogens,and their ability to transport younger rocks over older ones.This study explores these issues in the Casentino-Romagna axial sector of the Northern Apennines,which expose regional forethrusts and backthrusts.Detailed field mapping and analysis of superposed tectonic structures were integrated with apatite fission-track dating for constraining the tim-ing of rock exhumation and correlated tectonic events.Collectively,the results have allowed us to inter-pret the evolution of the study area in terms of two main deformation stages.Specifically,a first,long phase(D_(1))progressed from NE-directed,in-sequence thrusting(∼18 to∼10-9 Ma)to late out-of-sequence thrusting(∼8-5 Ma).A successive deformation phase,that we refer to as D_(2)(∼4-2 Ma),con-sisted of backthrusts and associated folds that were ubiquitous and systematically overprinted onto the foreland-verging D_(1)structures.Such retrovergent structures identify a late deformation phase dom-inated by the development of passive-roof duplexes that propagated hinterlandward into the orogen up to beyond the primary watershed ridge.Orogen-scale processes controlled the evolution of forelandward D_(1)-phase thrusts,although late erosion could have played a major role by bringing the Apennine thrust wedge toward an undercritical state.The latter conditions could have contributed to keeping the out-of-sequence thrusts active,and eventually promoted the development of the D_(2)passive-roof duplexes.展开更多
文摘Passive-roof duplexes accommodate shortening at the mountain front of many fold-and-thrust belts worldwide.These structures typically manifest at the surface by hinterland-verging backthrusts that decouple thin-skinned thrust sheets from underlying foreland-verging duplexes.Although the main fac-tors controlling the development of passive-roof duplexes have mostly been identified,some of their intrinsic characteristics are still poorly defined.These relate to their spatio-temporal relationships to thrust faults located further inland in orogens,and their ability to transport younger rocks over older ones.This study explores these issues in the Casentino-Romagna axial sector of the Northern Apennines,which expose regional forethrusts and backthrusts.Detailed field mapping and analysis of superposed tectonic structures were integrated with apatite fission-track dating for constraining the tim-ing of rock exhumation and correlated tectonic events.Collectively,the results have allowed us to inter-pret the evolution of the study area in terms of two main deformation stages.Specifically,a first,long phase(D_(1))progressed from NE-directed,in-sequence thrusting(∼18 to∼10-9 Ma)to late out-of-sequence thrusting(∼8-5 Ma).A successive deformation phase,that we refer to as D_(2)(∼4-2 Ma),con-sisted of backthrusts and associated folds that were ubiquitous and systematically overprinted onto the foreland-verging D_(1)structures.Such retrovergent structures identify a late deformation phase dom-inated by the development of passive-roof duplexes that propagated hinterlandward into the orogen up to beyond the primary watershed ridge.Orogen-scale processes controlled the evolution of forelandward D_(1)-phase thrusts,although late erosion could have played a major role by bringing the Apennine thrust wedge toward an undercritical state.The latter conditions could have contributed to keeping the out-of-sequence thrusts active,and eventually promoted the development of the D_(2)passive-roof duplexes.
