Baltic-Iranian Super Lineament – the global Trans-Eurasian belt of dislocations and planetary megafractures

Abstract

Summary Data on fault tectonics and the deep structure of the global Trans-Eurasian belt of dislocations and planetary megafracture (Baltic-Iranian Super Lineament – BISL) are generalized using the analysis of published data, geological, geophysical, cartographic, and cosmographie materials, that include the results of tectonic interpretation of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) images; the features of its distribution, segmentation and development history are clarified. The BISL is the Trans-Eurasian structure of a planetary rank – an integral part of the spatially regularly oriented ancient rhegmatic fault network of Eurasia, formed at the early stages of the formation of the rigid Earth crust under the influence of global stresses associated with the factor of rotation of the Earth. The geodynamic mode of formation and development of the belt as a whole structure cannot be described within the frameworks of any one of basic patterns – neither riftogenic nor collisional one. There is an interchanging domination of the regional as well as supra-regional divergence (rift zones) and convergence (collision zones) within the belt. That alternation characterizes the global nature of the belt, the unionizing of different geodynamic regimes in it as well as the wave character and hierarchy of tectonic processes.