Structural mapping in the Mediterranean: bridging laboratory to lithosphere

During the annual meeting of Gruppo Italiano di Geologia Strutturale (GIGS), held in Milano on 28–30 October 2013 (Zucali et al., 2013), a poster session was dedicated to structural mapping of the Mediterranean region. The goal was to highlight the structural–geological mapping skills of the GIGS community, in contrast to the tendency of the Italian evaluation agency to disregard, or underestimate, mapping work that is undertaken. The session collected a wide number of high-quality contributions, at scales adapted to highlight local problems. Significant attention within the community was drawn to the importance of primary data sources; these control the quality of laboratory results and subsequent geological conclusions. The success of the poster session formed the basis for this special issue focused upon structural geological mapping in the Mediterranean. It includes many different areas of the Italian geological domains, from North to South as well as Islands. The structural maps presented in this collection of 16 contributions represent the tools that have been fundamental to: (i) unravel the tectonic histories across old and recent orogenic belts, from Variscan convergence to different stages of Alpine-Apenninic evolution, across different structural levels; (ii) infer deformation mechanisms and the main tectonic systems acting at various structural levels and under different tectonic regimes; (iii) prospect resources or plan tunneling across mountain chains. Maps encompass various geological studies such as geothermal reservoirs (Montanari et al., 2015), brittle tectonics (D'Adda & Zanchetta, 2015; Festa, Fioraso, Bissacca, & Petrizzo, 2015; Ghiselli, Zucali, & Bini, 2015) and present-day seismotectonic evolution (Romagnoli, Catalano, Pavano, & Tortorici, 2015), continental and oceanic lithosphere-scale histories (Casini et al., 2015; Fazio, Cirrincione, & Antonino, 2015; Federico, Crispini, Malatesta, Torchio, & Capponi, 2015; Filice et al., 2015; Fontana, Tartarotti, Panseri, & Buscemi, 2015; Frassi, 2015; Funedda, Meloni, & Loi, 2015; Maino, Bonini, Dallagiovanna, & Seno, 2015; Ortolano, Cirrincione, Pezzino, Tripodi, & Zappala, 2015; Rebay, Maroni, Siletto, & Spalla, 2015; Schiavo et al., 2015). All maps have been constructed from the integration of structural analysis with stratigraphy, petrology, geochemistry-geochronology and geothermics and synthesizing data from multiscale structural investigation that can be organized in solid frameworks as geo-databases (Ortolano et al., 2015).