Abstract

The island of Cyprus sits at the plate boundary between Anatolia in the north and Africa in the south, at a transition from oceanic subduction in the west to continental strike-slip and collision tectonics in the east. The nature of the plate boundary at Cyprus has been historically controversial and poorly understood, in part due to a lack of constraints on local seismicity, despite the historical record of deadly earthquakes. Cyprus itself is dominated by the Troodos ophiolite, an exceptionally preserved piece of oceanic lithosphere that has undergone significant uplift in the last 6 Myr. Remarkably, the highest point of the island, Mount Olympus (1,952 m above sea level), is formed of rocks from the Earth’s mantle, suggested to be exhumed by serpentinite diapirism; this process is also still poorly understood. In this talk I will cover the recent increase in seismological observations in Cyprus, including my PhD work on creating a high-resolution earthquake catalogue for the island, with a new 1-D P-wave velocity model and a new local magnitude scale, making use of a 2-year deployment of 5 broadband seismometers by Imperial College London supplementing the growing permanent network. I will discuss the implications of observed seismicity patterns, alongside new and existing focal mechanism analysis, for ongoing subduction processes and incipient continental collision, as well as links to the serpentinite diapirism proposed to form Mount Olympus.