Inside the Aegean metamorphic core complexes

This is the second edition of this popular field guide (reprinted by The Virtual Explorer). This edition contains some minor modifications, and minor corrections. The Aegean metamorphic core complexes were discovered as the result of a thesis study conducted by Greetje Banga (1983), when she was at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Utrecht. She sought permission and was granted leave to conduct a minor project in structural geology in conjunction with her main study in petrology and geochemistry, which involved field work on the island of Ios. She conducted one of the first studies of the fabrics and microstructures of the Cycladic islands, and her work lead to the recognition of the major ductile shear zone that forms the mylonitic carapace of the Ios dome (see Lister et al. 1984). Banga's thesis provided the basic data that led to the hypothesis that ductile stretching of the Aegean continental crust had taken place during Oligo-Miocene extensional tectonism. Lister et al. (1984) suggested the existence of metamorphic core complexes in the Cyclades that had formed during this period of extension, and compared the Aegean gneiss domes and the core complexes of the Colorado River extensional corridor in the U.S. Cordillera (e.g., see Davis & Lister 1988, Reynolds & Lister 1987). The first edition of this field guide was produced to allow some of the Earth Scientists that attended a Penrose Conference in Crete in 1996 to review some of the concepts that were developed in this early work, and to introduce work that had been conducted during the subsequent decade. The second edition (made available here below) contains some minor modifications, and corrections.