Las fallas del recinto de la Alhambra : Faults in the Alhambra area

The Alhambra is built on a conglomeratic formation, known as the Alhambra Formation, whose age is Pliocene to Lower Pleistocene and has a visible thickness of 200 metres. The western part of the San Pedro escarpment corresponds to a fault-scarp with some retreat; the fault-plane outcrops in the innermost part of the escarpment, showing normal displacement and NW-SE strike with NE steep dip. This fault is the most important one of a set that outcrops along the northern hillslope of the Alhambra. Several topographic steps with NW-SE orientation are interpreted as retreated fault-scarps. In some cases, the activity of these faults seems to be very recent and maybe related to earthquakes. The seismic risk associated with these faults (and maybe some not-outcropping ones) can be taken to be moderate, as some historical damages have been reported concerning the Alhambra walls and the fence. In this respect, the Alhambra fence has numerous cracks geometrically related to fault planes outcropping in the Alhambra Formation, i.e. faults and cracks are continuous and have similar strike and dip. We hypothesize that these cracks are due to small displacements along the faults, occurred during recent earthquakes in the region. These faults constitute mechanical discontinuities, which represent a supplementary risk, because they contribute to reduce the stability of the entire rock massif

Caracteristicas petrograficas y datacion U/Th de una calcreta laminar quaternaria: implicaciones de la captura de la cuenca de Guadix-Baza por el rio Guadalquivir

The Guadix topographic depression is a Neogene-Quaternary basin located in the central sector of the Betic Cordillera at the boundary between the South Iberian margin and the Alboran domain. This topographic depression is a plateau with an average elevation of 1000 m in the northern limb of the Sierra Nevada range. The continental deposits infilling the Guadix basin span time from the late Tortonian to the Pleistocene, when a laminar calcrete developed on fine to coarse-grained fluvial and lacustrine deposits. Four coeval subsamples from the top laminae of the calcrete were collected and dated by the U/Th method. The resulting date is 42.6 ± 5.6 ka, which indicates the minimum age for the cessation of active sedimentation in the Guadix basin. We envisage the capture of the Pliocene-Pleistocene endorheic Guadix basin by the Guadalquivir River after 42 ka as the main factor triggering the formation of the present-day eroded landscape. After the capture, the combination of climatic (wet periods), lithological (soft and loose sediments), and topographic (high average altitude) features allowed the development of the present-day entrenched drainage patter