A new map of the thickness of the crust for the Central Mediterranean has just been published.
, a seismologist at the , used data recorded over the past 25 years by hundreds of seismic stations across Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Greece and Malta to perform seismic tomography and map the crustal structure in the region. The Earth's crust, typically 30 kilometres thick, does not have the same thickness everywhere. The crust generally is thinner beneath the sea, such as the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Sicily Channel and thicker beneath the mountains, such as the Maghrebian-Apennines mountain chains. This high-resolution map provides new insight into the tectonics around us, particularly in identifying areas of crustal deformation.
The study reveals that beneath the Sicily Channel, between Malta, Lampedusa, Pantelleria and Sicily, two major Earth processes are taking place, stretching and thinning of the crust, underlain by deeper mantle upwelling. These processes explain the bathymetry of the Sicily Channel, characterised by valleys deeper than 1 kilometre.
This study was conducted in collaboration with scientists from Università Roma Tre and part of project GEOMED, which was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 843696. The article is published by the acclaimed journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems and is available as open access through this
