The major changes in Alboran Sea and its periphery since the Tortonian

Major changes have affected the Alboran Sea and its periphery since the Tortonian. They are essentially related to the structural evolution marked by tectonic inversion due to shortening. The revisiting of seismic data available on the Moroccan margin and on the adjacent Western Alboran Basin, added to good stratigraphic calibration (in particular, the limit between the Miocene and the Plio-Quaternary) from the oil drilling, allowed us to review the age of the oldest deposits in the Neogene basins of western Rif, thanks to their extension at sea, and to propose a new hypothesis for the opening age of the basin and that of the Strait of Gibraltar. We will also show that the upheaval caused by the progressive uplift of the Alboran Ridge and Xauen and Tofiño banks and the instability of the sediments that it has caused predate the canyon that connects the Strait of Gibraltar to the Algero–Balearic Basin. The continuous supply of Atlantic water into the Alboran Sea explains the thickness of the saline series in the deeper parts of the Mediterranean Sea. We give the arguments to demonstrate that the tectonic inversion guided the evolution of the Alboran Sea since the Tortonian.