Tectonis controls on foreland basin architecture - An approach based on the IBS Research Project

The geology of foreland basins has attracted the attention of sedimento logists and structural geologists over the last ten years as best suited places to study the interplay between tectonics and sedimentation. As foreland basins are genetically and dynamically related to the corresponding orogenic belts, the arquitecture of the basin fill is considered to record the main events of thrusting and crustal sho rtening. It is one of the chief purposes of research of Module 2 within the IBS project, to describe and improve our understanding of the processes involved in those relationships at three different scales of approach: at crustal scale, to study the origin and evolution of a foreland basin; at basin fill scale, to describe the geometry, sequence architecture, facies disatribution and growth stratal patterns related to synsedimentary thrust deformation, and at sequence and sedimentary unit scale, to describe sand body geometries in relation to the sequence elements.