New dates for elevated coastal sediments in southern Calabria, Italy suggest that land rose faster than earlier estimates indicated. Researchers combined mineral-grain dating with maps of former shorelines and faults. The peer-reviewed study supports an interpretation involving the tearing of a descending oceanic slab, with calculated uplift varying widely across the region.
Coastal surfaces preserved high above the sea provide evidence of land movement in southern Calabria, the southern Italian region facing Sicily. Rebecca Dorsey and colleagues dated sand from these marine terraces and combined the ages with mapped landforms. The peer-reviewed study addresses a shortage of reliable direct ages for high terraces, where previous estimates had placed some correlated surfaces at around a million years old.[1]
Luminescence dating estimates how long mineral grains have been buried since their last exposure to sunlight. The sampled ages overlap across different elevations and yield an average burial age, weighted across the measurements, of 118,800 years; its uncertainty is 8,700 years. Combining the younger chronology with terrace heights gives uplift rates ranging from below one to about 12 millimetres annually across the study region.[1]
The authors interpret the rapid uplift through tearing of the Ionian slab, an oceanic plate segment descending into Earth’s mantle. Reduced downward pull could let the overlying land rebound. Fault displacement and surface geometry contribute further evidence. These rates average movement over roughly 120,000 years, so they cannot locate an earthquake in time or distinguish shorter fluctuations in fault activity.[1]
