Cenozoic foreland basins of Western Europe / Кайнозойские форланд-бассейны Западной Европы

Over the last ten years or so, since the Fribourg meeting in 1985 (Homewood et al. 1986), the attention given by sedimentologists and structural geologists to the geology of foreland basins has been growing continuously, parallel to the increase of co-operative links between scientists from the two disciplines. A number of reasons lie behind this development. Attempting to understand the growth of an orogen without paying due attention to the stratigraphic record of the derived sediments would be unrealistic. It would, moreover, be equally unrealistic to construct restored sections across the chain without considering the constraints imposed by the basin-fill architecture, or to describe the basinfill evolution disregarding the development of the thrust sequence. As in other sedimentary basins, tectonics and sedimentation dynamically interact in foreland basins. Additionally, as foreland basins are incorporated in the growth process of the orogen, they are more likely than extensional basins to be subject to uplift and, therefore, more accessible to direct field observation. Foreland basins observed on the field may help in the understanding of nonobservable subsurface analogues. This is essentially why foreland basins have always been traditional field areas for sedimentological research and training, and also why they have recently been considered as ideal field laboratories, best suited to the study and understanding of the interplay between tectonics and sedimentation (Fig. 1). <...>