The Medina Wrench: a key to the kinematics of the central and eastern Mediterranean over the past 5 Ma

Abstract

The Medina Wrenth in the central Mediterranean is a transform fault connecting the plate collision in northwest Africa and northern Sicily with that occurring at the Aegean plate boundary, south of Greece. The more than 800 km long crescent-shaped wrench zone is currently seismically quiet but exhibits major deformation since 5 Ma within a belt 30–100 km wide. It forms the southern boundary of two microplates moving eastward with respect to Africa and Europe. A simple plate rotation model constrained by recent paleomagnetic data indicates that a continental Iblean microplate and a hybrid continental/oceanic Ionian microplate, separated along the Malta Escarpment, have rotated anticlockwise by 11° and 12°, respectively, around poles in southern Italy. These rotations involved some 100 km of dextral eastward movement relative to Africa of the Ionian Basin north of the Medina Wrench since 5 Ma. Combining the published 26° clockwise rotation of the Peloponnesus and northwest half of the Aegean with the 12° anticlockwise rotation of the Ionian microplate results in (a) a 99% agreement between the length of the seismic Benioff Zone beneath Greece and the total convergence of the microplates, and (b) an average rate of convergence across the Aegean plate boundary southwest of the Peloponnesus of 6.6 ± 1cm a −1 since the Miocene. Relative motion between microplates in a collision zone thus may be as much as 6 times faster than convergence between the major plates which spawned them, and they can be considered rigid to the first order over the time span involved.