The neotectonic activity of northern Central Europe – the current picture

Northern Central Europe is a slowly deforming, low-strain intraplate area. Nevertheless, there is evidence for neotectonic fault activity, as well as for historic and recent earthquakes. The current knowledge is that the tectonic activity is mainly concentrated at major WNW-ESE striking lithospheric structures, from north to south, the Sorgenfrei-Tornquist Zone, the southern and northern margins of the Ringkøbing Fyn high and at individual faults like the Osning thrust or the Harz boundary fault, with some recent earthquake activity in between, possibly at the Thor suture. The Ringkøbing-Fyn high is a region of thicker crust separating the northern from the southern Permian basin. The Sorgenfrei-Tornquist Zone, the Osning thrust and the Harz boundary fault are located at the northern and southern margin of the Central European Basin System, respectively and these are the two areas, where the Late Cretaceous inversion phase that is characteristic of northern Central Europe, had a very pronounced effect. The faults in these areas have in common that they penetrate large parts of the crust, partly down to the Moho. Therefore, they represent stress-sensitive, first-order lithospheric features, where past, present, and potentially future seismic events are manifested. Repeated reactivation of these structures might have caused large-scale fatigue processes that can have weakened the faults and made them prone to stress release and neotectonic movements and enhance the potential for a reactivation due to stress field changes induced by glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). This has implications for the seismic hazard assessment of northern Central Europe.