Résumé
During Late Oligocene-Early Miocene different domains formed in the region between Iberia and Africa in the westernmost Mediterranean, including thinned continental crust and a Flysch Trough turbiditic deposits likely floored by oceanic crust [1]. At this time, the Ronda peridotite likely constituted the subcontinental lithospheric mantle of the Alboran domain, which mantle lithosphere was undergoing strong thinning and melting [2] [3] coevally with Early Miocene extension in the overlying Alpujárride-Maláguide stacked crust [4, 5].Intrusive Cr- rich pyroxenites in the Ronda massif records the geochemical processes occurring in the subcontinental mantle of the Alboran domain during the Late Oligocene [6]. Recent isotopic studies of these pyroxenites indicate that their mantle source was contaminated by a subduction component released by detrital crustal sediments [6]. This new data is consistent with a subduction setting for the late evolution of the Alboran lithospheric mantle just prior to its final intracrustal emplacement in the early Miocene Further detailed structural studies of the Ronda plagioclase peridotites—related to the initial stages of ductile emplacement of the peridotite—have led to Hidas et al. [7] to propose a geodynamic model where folding and shearing of an attenuated mantle lithosphere occurred by backarc basin inversion followed by failed subduction initiation that ended into the intracrustal emplacement of peridotite into the Alboran wedge in the earliest Miocene. This hypothesis implies that the crustal component recorded in late, Cr-rich websterite dykes might come from underthrusted crustal rocks from the Flysch and/or Alpujárrides units that might have been involved in the earliest stages of this subduction initiation stage.