Exhuming Anatolia : the Italian contribution to the low-temperature thermochronological study of Turkey and the surrounding regions

This paper chronicles and summarizes the main results of the cooperation between Turkish and Italian geoscientists in the low-temperature thermochronological study [fission-track analysis, (U-Th)/He, clay mineralogy, vitrinite reflectance, Raman spectroscopy of carbonaceous material] of Anatolia and the adjoining regions. Such methods have been applied to a variety of geological provinces/structures and lithostratigraphic units comprising -west to east- the Thrace Basin, the North Anatolian Fault at Ganos Mt., the İstanbul terrane, Kazdağ, Uludağ, the Karakaya Complex, the Menderes and Alanya massifs, the Pontides, the Bitlis-Pütürge massif, the eastern Anatolian Plateau, and the Lesser Caucasus. This line of cooperation –active since 2003- has involved chiefly faculty and students from the Universities of Bologna and Padua in Italy and Istanbul Technical University, although experts from other institutions have been involved from time to time (CNR Pisa, CNRS-IMPMC Paris, ETH Zürich, Geological Institute of Tbilisi, Institute of Geophysics of Tbilisi, National Academy of Armenia, and the Universities of Arizona, Baku, Calabria, Florence, Göttingen, Miskolc, Rome 3, and Tübingen). Among the several results obtained during this cooperation and discussed in the paper, of particular significance are (i) the identification of a mid-Miocene episode of cooling/exhumation along the Arabia-Eurasia collision zone (arguably the phase of maximum indentation and mechanical coupling) and (ii) the existence of an Oligocene (but likely older) praecursor of the North Anatolian Fault in the western Marmara region.