Subsidence of the North Aegean trough: an alternative view

Abstract
The North Aegean trough is a zone of deep water trending from northeast to southwest across the N Aegean Sea. The western part of the trough, the Sporadhes basin, contains a thick sequence of late Cenozoic sediments. Le Pichon et al. 1984 suggested that the Sporadhes basin coincides with a zone of extreme lithospheric stretching and that the crustal thickness is locally reduced to only 15 km. We argue that the geophysical evidence cited by Le Pichon et al. can be equally well explained by a crustal model involving a much smaller amount of local crustal thinning.