We just submitted a paper entitled “The seismotectonics of the Po Plain (northern Italy): tectonic diversity in a blind faulting domain” by Paola Vannoli, Pierfrancesco Burrato and Gianluca Valensise, for publication on Pure and Applied Geophysics.
This paper is partly a review and partly the result of original research on the identification of seismogenic sources in the Po Plain, Northern Italy, and on the role played by the paleogeography in controlling the geometry and style of the active faults systems. These are mostly blind, i.e. buried beneath the thick sedimentary cover of the Po basin, and hence very elusive, yet they pose a significant seismic hazard as testified by the recent 2012 Emilia-Romagna earthquake sequence. In this work we reorganized and presented in an orderly scheme the established knowledge on the blind shallow thrusts such as those responsible for the 2012 earthquakes, but we also shed light on two new potential categories of seismogenic sources. We show that a significant contribution to Po Plain seismic activity, end hence to the local seismic hazard, comes from reactivated inherited faults and from transverse structures that developed within the compressional wedges.
