The topography of the Iberian Peninsula from integrated geophysical-petrological multi-data inversion

Special issue Physical properties and observations of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system.-- 21 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix
The topography of the Iberian Peninsula is characterized by the presence of Variscan and Alpine orogenic belts and foreland basins, but what sets it apart from the rest of Western Europe are the large elevated flat surfaces (700 m above sea-level on average) in its central parts. The origin and support of such high average topography, whether isostatic or dynamic in nature, is a matter of intense debate. To understand Iberian topography, it is key to have a reliable image of the present-day lithospheric thermochemical structure. So far, this structure remains poorly constrained, particularly at mantle level. The goal of this paper is to derive robust estimates of the thermal, compositional and density structure of the lithosphere beneath the Iberian Peninsula from an integrated geophysical-petrological probabilistic inversion of surface wave, elevation, geoid anomaly and heat flow data. Our inversion reveals an average lithospheric thickness of 80–100 km in the Iberian Peninsula with only moderate lateral variations. The most prominent lithospheric thickness change is a steep decrease from the central to the easternmost Pyrenees. The thinnest lithosphere in our models is found below the south-eastern Mediterranean margin (
This project has been funded by Spanish Ministry of Science projects CGL2012-37222 (J. Fullea) and PGC2018-095154-B-I00 (A.M Negredo). J. Fullea is supported by an Atracción Talento senior fellowship (2018-T1/AMB/11493) funded by Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). I. Palomeras is funded by the Beatriz Galindo fellowship (BEAGAL18/00090) co-founded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and University of Salamanca (Spain). ICM-CSIC is a Centre of Excellence Severo Ochoa (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Project CEX2019-000928-S