Where

The Danube River Basin – Black Sea area represents a unique natural laboratory for studying the interplay between lithospheric and surface processes and the source-sink relationships. Changes in source areas due to past and active tectonics control the transport and deposition in adjacent sinks. In particular, the last 15 Ma is intriguing for Europe because of known global and regional climatic changes and active tectonics in the Alpine domain resulting in increased exhumation rates in the source realm, rain fall and vegetation changes and increased sediment budget. Within this time era a more regional event is superimposed, the Messinian Salinity Crisis, between 5.6 – 5.3 Ma associated with major changes at the local Black Sea scale during recent times.

(to be updated) Location of Danube - Black Sea system in the core of Europe’s
topography and the main CRP problem statements studied 

Of particular note in this regard are the Carpathians where great variations in lithospheric structure have led to pronounced weakness and the localization of strains in adjacent basins. In the Carpathian-Pannanion system significant Quaternary vertical movement cause increased seismicity, landscape and slope instabilities, rapid drainage system changes and the development of late stage hydrocarbon traps. Late stage structural inversion of post-orogenic basins in the Carpathians-Dinardes-Pannoinian domain involve large differential vertical movement at regional and local scales. This is associated with significant changes in recent lithospheric dynamics, tectonic topography and climate variations. In intra-Carpathian basins it is crucial to relate river dynamics and active land-forming processes to changes in tectonic topography.

The drainage network of the Danube river system and its transition zone to the active sink area of the Black Sea responds rapidly to changes in the upper reaches of the source-sink system. Since active processes provide the key link to the sedimentary balance of this system they are influenced by inherited memory from the Carpathians collision times, rapid sea-level changes, basin filling patterns an climatic instability and changes. The Black Sea is an active sink system enabling the link of crustal scale tectonics and climate processes to its high-resolution shallow sedimentary record in a set of basin evolutionary models.