EVOLUTION OF THE LARGE-SCALE ACTIVE MANISA FAULT, SOUTHWEST TURKEY: IMPLICATIONS ON FAULT DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL TECTONICS

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate and discuss mechanism(s) responsible for the growth and evolution of large-scale corrugated normal faults in southwest Turkey. We report spectacular exposures of normal fault surfaces as parts of the Manisa Fault - a ~50-km-long northeast-ward arched active fault that defines the northwestern edge of the Manisa graben, which is subsidiary to the Gediz Graben. The fault is a single through-going corrugated fault system with distinct along-strike bends. It follows NW direction for 15 km in the south, then bends into an approximately E-W direction in the northwest. The fault trace occurs at the base of topographic scarps and separates the Quaternary limestone scree and alluvium from the highly strained, massive bed-rock carbonates. The fault is exposed on continuous pristine slip surfaces, up to 60 m high. The observed surfaces are polished and ornamented by well-preserved various brittle structural features, such as slip-parallel striations, gutters and tool tracks, and numerous closely spaced extension fractures with straight or crescentic traces. The rocks both in the footwall and hanging-wall of the fault possessa well-developed fault rock stratigraphy made up, from structurally lowest to the top, of massive undeformed recrystallized limestone, a zone of cemented breccia sheets, corrugated polished slip planes, and first brecciated, then unbrecciated scree. The observed slip surfaces of the Manisa Fault contain two sets of striations that suggest an early phase of sinistral strike-slip and a subsequent normal-slip movements. The first phase is attributed to: (i) approximately E-W-directed compression that commenced during either (?) Early-Middle Pliocene time or (ii) the current extensional tectonics and consequent modern graben formation in southwest Turkey that initiated during the Plio-Quaternary. During this period, the Manisa Fault was reactivated and it became a major segment. Stress inversion of fault slip data suggests that southwest Turkey has been experiencing multidirectional crustal extension, with components of approximately N-S, E-W, NE-SW and NW-SE extension. Following the reactivation, the inherited fault segments were connected to each other through interaction, linkage and amalgamation of previously discontinuous and overlapping smaller stepping adjacent faults. Linkage was via the formation of new connecting (breaching) fault(s) or by curved propagation of fault-tips. The result is a single through-going corrugated fault trace with distinct along-strike bends. The final geometry of the Manisa Fault is thus the combined result of reactivation and continuing interaction between previously discontinuous segmented fault traces. © 2006 Lavoisier SAS. All rights reserved.