Associated Project

University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Carpathian Basins Project

External project funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) UK

Investigators: prof. Gregory Houseman

Brief description (details available on the project website)

Added value: The CBP project has a significant role within the Source-Sink proposal because it will provide measurement and analysis of deep structure, thus providing context and cause for many of the surface processes that are the subject of other Source-Sink projects.

Methodologies/experiments: The CBP project depends on two distinct methodologies:

In the past two years we have collected continuous broadband seismic data from a network of 56 seismographs operating across a broad swath of Eastern Austria, western Hungary and northern Serbia. In coming years we will be processing these data using the following techniques: seismic tomography, receiver functions, lithospheric seismic anisotropy, surface wave phase velocity analysis, and local seismicity mapping, in order to develop broad-scale models for the structure of the continental lithosphere in these basins.

Synchronously, we are developing geodynamical models for the evolution of the lithosphere based on non-linear viscous constitutive laws, which simulate the way in which the lithosphere responds to stress differences over geological time periods. These models will be constrained using data from both our seismic project and from other projects in the Source-Sink consortium which constrain the deformation history.

The Carpathian Basin Project is a project of type: 1. data analysis - for the seismic part of the project; and 2. modelling and interpretation - for the geodynamical modelling.

Deliverables and/or milestones:

• a tomographic model of the lithosphere and upper mantle beneath the western part of the Pannonian and Vienna Basins;
• plausible quantitative models of the crustal and lithospheric deformation that has occurred in these basins - including:
• an explanation of the observed lithospheric anisotropy
• an explanation of the observed distribution of extension for the basin.