The region encompassing the circum-Mediterranean mountain chains provides a record of long-lived convergence between Africa/Arabia and Eurasia, including several microcontinents that rifted off these major plates and trapped in the convergence zone. The present kinematics of this area is largely controlled by the subduction of land-locked ocean remnants, giving rise to slab-rollback, extensional back-arcs and lateral escape of terranes.

The Mediterranean area is hence an exceptional natural laboratory for studying various stages of plate margin evolution, including the formation of rifted margins, intraoceanic and continental subduction, continental collision, exhumation and emplacement of high-pressure terranes and orogenic peridotites and ophiolites, as well as the formation of flexural foreland and back-arc basins. A rapidly emerging topic is the possible transition from a passive to an active margin observed in the Western Mediterranean.

The aim of this session is to gather researchers working in the peri-Mediterranean area (including the North African margins, the Gulf of Cadiz, the Betic-Rift belt, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Apennines, the Dinarides, the Hellenides, Turkey and the Levant) to share their experience to discuss the "big picture" that emerges from different disciplines.

We would like receive contributions from studies comprising a wide range of disciplines including geological constrains (stratigraphy, igneous and metamorphic petrology, geochronology, tectonics and geomorphology), geophysics (seismicity, passive and active seismological imaging, gravity), geodesy (GPS, InSAR) and modelling (numerical and analogue) and that are aimed at constraining the lithospheric structure, tectonics, geodynamic evolution and paleogeography of this region.

Talks and posters will be organized into topical groups that will include, but will not be limited to, mountain building, back-arc process and slab roll-back, constrains on past and present kinematics of this exciting natural laboratory.