Corrigendum to “The kinematics of central-southern Turkey and northwest Syria revisited” [Tectonophysics 618 (2014) 35–66

Abstract

The authors regret to inform that there is a need to make correction to the published article and the corrected text is provided here. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.The Seyrek et al. (2014) synthesis of active crustal deformation in the northeast Mediterranean region combines offshore data with onshore evidence from central-southern Turkey and northwest Syria. The part of this synthesis integrating data from within and offshore of northwest Syria made extensive reference to Hardenberg and Robertson, 2007 and Hardenberg and Robertson, 2013. Part of this critique involved the presumption that the offshore seismic line located in Fig. 2 and depicted in Fig. 5 of Hardenberg and Robertson (2013) was in fact seismic line 5 of Vidal et al., 2000a and Vidal et al., 2000b, which Hardenberg and Robertson (2013) had plotted in the wrong place. However, subsequent discussions with Mat Hardenberg and Alastair Robertson have established, on the contrary, that they depicted a different seismic line. Thus, although there is no error in the Seyrek et al. (2014) interpretation of the geology or sense of active crustal deformation in the study region, a mistake was evidently made in the preparation of our paper, which this present note seeks to clarify.Given the current political situation, which makes additional substantive work in Syria unlikely for the foreseeable future, it is helpful to clarify the source of the above-mentioned confusion so mistakes arising from it do not propagate farther when research in Syria eventually resumes. We thus note, first, that Mat and Alastair have explained that the reference to ‘offshore seismic evidence’ on p. 234 of Hardenberg and Robertson (2007) is not to Vidal et al. (2000a), even though the latter is the only publication on seismic reflection data from the region immediately offshore of Syria that they cited, it is to an unpublished offshore dataset collected in 1975 by Spectrum Energy. Likewise, the acknowledgement on p. 468 of Hardenberg and Robertson (2013) that ‘We are grateful to Shell Syria for helping to sponsor the fieldwork and Spectrum Energy for providing access to 2D seismic data.’ is also referring to this 1975 seismic dataset, even though it does not say so and the wording in relation to fieldwork creates the impression that it relates to seismic data from somewhere onshore in Syria. Neither of the Hardenberg and Robertson (2013) figures that report seismic data makes any mention of Spectrum Energy and one of their captions refers to the Vidal et al., 2000a and Vidal et al., 2000b publications, seemingly confirming the impression of a connection with the latter when in reality no such link exists. The nature (indeed, the existence) of this 1975 seismic dataset only becomes evident on pp. 172–174 of Hardenberg (2003), although neither of the subsequent publications suggests that anyone might wish to read any part of this thesis for this information. In particular, the map in Fig. 4.3 on p. 173 of Hardenberg (2003) makes it clear that the seismic line discussed by Hardenberg and Robertson (2013) is Spectrum Energy line 24 S and the southern part of their line 24 N. Rather than showing the mis-plotting of any seismic line, Fig. 4 of Seyrek et al. (2014) can therefore now be regarded as an attempt to depict the relative positions, which no-one had previously illustrated, of this Spectrum Energy seismic line (in grey) and seismic line 5 of Vidal et al., 2000a and Vidal et al., 2000b (in purple), the mid-point of the latter being plotted ~ 8 km west of the southern end of the former. The similarities in the records from these two seismic lines confirm the continuity of the principal offshore geological structures in the region, this being the main reason why we looked into these seismic data in the first place.