Greater Caucasus Tectonics

Recent work from the Greater Caucasus is focused on understanding the relationship between topography, along-strike gradients in both modern tectonics and climate, and measures of erosion rate (Forte et al., 2022a) and exhumation rate (Forte et al., 2022b). This largely builds on past efforts to understand the reflection of tectonics in the topography of the Greater Caucasus (e.g., Forte et al., 2014, Forte et al., 2016) and tectonic processes important for those relationships (e.g., Mumladze et al., 2015).

A significant portion of active deformation within the eastern Greater Caucasus is localized within the Kura Fold-Thrust Belt. My students and I have endeavored to understand the structural geometry of the belt and its relation to the Greater Caucasus through time (e.g., Forte et al., 2010, Forte et al., 2013, Forte et al., 2015, Sukhishvili et al., 2020), with a specific focus on the establishing the extent to which the Kura Fold-Thrust Belt initiated diachronously or synchronously along-strike (e.g., Forte et al., 2010, Sukhishvili et al., 2020, Forte et al., 2024).

The southeastern foreland of the Greater Caucasus as exposed within the Kura Fold-Thrust Belt presents a rich archive of the tectonic evolution of both the Greater Caucasus and the thrust belt itself. Past work has focused on better characterizing the drivers of depositional environments and the stratigraphic framework of this portion of the foreland (e.g., van Baak et al., 2013, Forte & Cowgill, 2013, Forte et al., 2015). Recent efforts consider the history of depositional environments within the southeastern Greater Caucasus and implications for the dominance of tectonic or climatic signals preserved in the stratigraphy (Fowler & Forte, 2024).

The provenance of sediments within the southern foreland basins of the Greater Caucasus provide a rich record of both the tectonics of the Caucasus, but also the history of sediment routing within the foreland itself. Prior work has helped establish the detrital zircon U-Pb age signatures from key source terranes in the Greater Caucasus (Cowgill et al., 2016). More recent work has expanded these source characterizations to include bulk geochemistry and used the evolution of provenance as preserved in Kura Fold Thrust Belt sediments to explore the structural history of the southern Greater Caucasus rangefront and establish the timing of initiation of the central KFTB  (Forte et al., 2024). Recent work is expanding this to develop source characterization for U-Pb and Hf isotopes in zircons throughout the Caucasus (Fowler et al., In Prep-A) and applying these to provenance within the Kartli Basin (Fowler et al., In Prep-B).