Ricerc@Sapienza

The Podolia region is located along the western border of the Eastern European Craton, which is also
known as Ukrainian Shield. From the Ordovician to the Miocene, this area formed part of an epicontinental
basin system. In order to investigate the effects of orogenic cycles occurring along the plate
margin, a multi-disciplinary approach was used in this study. Paleotemperature analysis and low temperature
thermochronometry were combined with stratigraphic data to obtain a burial model for
the Paleozoic succession exposed in the study area. Maximum burial for Silurian and Devonian rocks
occurred during the Devonian and Early Carboniferous at depths of 4–5 km, as constrained by
vitrinite reflectance and illite content in mixed illite-smectite layers. Thermochronometric data indicate
that exhumation through the 45–120 °C temperature range took place between the Late Triassic
and the Early Jurassic, and that no significant burial occurred afterwards (temperatures characterising
the stratigraphically lowermost units remaining below ca. 60 °C). These results point to a major
exhumation event coeval with the Cimmerian orogenesis, which took place a few hundreds of kilometres
away from the study area. On the other hand, no significant effect of the Alpine orogenesis
was recorded, although the collisional front was located shows how paleothermal and thermochronometric analyses can be successfully integrated with stratigraphic
data to reconstruct the burial history, and how the burial history of a basin located on a plate
margin can, in some cases, be independent from the distance of the margin from the collisional
fronts.