Quantifying earliest rift development, Corinth Rift, Greece: Integrating existing marine and terrestrial data and ocean drilling

The Corinth Rift is an active continental rift zone with some of the highest rates of extension worldwide. Available datasets coupled with high rates of extension and sediment infill provide very high spatial and temporal resolution of rift processes. Analysis and integration of datasets from onshore and offshore in the Corinth Rift have been used to identify how the rift and fault systems have evolved through time. The results can be used to test how an early rift evolves, what structures become established in this early phase, and over what time periods change occurs. The Corinth Rift results indicate that rift and fault structure has changed significantly over quite short time periods, including depocentre structure, polarity of faulting and linkage of rift-bounding faults. A new ocean drilling expedition in 2017, as part of IODP, now provides ground truth of the most recent basin sediments for the first time. These results will be used to establish a detailed chronostratigraphy, evidence for changing basin environment as the basin fluctuates between marine and isolated conditions, and details of the syn-rift sedimentary record. Integration of the existing data with the new drilling results will give resolutions of ~10 kyr and 1-10 km of rates and timing of fault activity, rift evolution and surface processes.