Active tectonics of the outer northern Apennines: Adriatic vs. Po Plain seismicity and stress fields

• The active stress field varies along the strike the outer northern Apennines.
• The stress field is dominated by horizontal maximum compression.
• The Po Plain area is dominated by active thrust tectonics.
• The Adriatic sector is dominated by an active strike-slip tectonic regime.

The recent earthquake sequences of 2012 (northern Italy) and 2013 (Marche offshore) provided new, fundamental constraints to the active tectonic setting of the outer northern Apennines. In contrast to the Po Plain area, where the 2012 northern Italy earthquakes confirmed active frontal thrusting, the new focal mechanisms obtained in this study for the 2013 Marche offshore earthquakes indicate that only minor thrust fault reactivation occurs in the Adriatic domain, even for a theoretically favourably oriented maximum horizontal compression. Recent seismicity in this domain appears to be mainly controlled by transcurrent crustal faults dissecting the Apennine thrust belt. The along-strike stress field variation from the Po Plain to the Adriatic area has been quantitatively investigated by applying the multiple inverse method (MIM) to the analysis of the entire seismicity recorded from January 1976 to August 2014, from the top 12 km of the crust (fault plane solutions from 127 earthquakes with MW ≥ 4), allowing us to obtain a comprehensive picture of the state of stress over the outer zone of the fold and thrust belt. The present-day stress field has been defined for 39 cells of 1.5° × 1.5° surface area and 12 km depth. The obtained stress field maps point out that, although the entire outer northern Apennines belt is characterized by a sub-horizontal maximum compressive axis (σ1), the minimum compression (σ3) is sub-vertical only in the Po Plain area, becoming sub-horizontal in the Adriatic sector, thus confirming that the latter region is dominated by an active tectonic regime of strike-slip type.