Aspects of basin inversion in southern Britain

The Wessex Basin of southern England, a Permian to Cretaceous extensional basin, can be structurally divided into a set of constituent asymmetrical graben, bounded by major E–W-trending zones of en echelon syn-depositional normal faults. The graben were inverted in late Cretaceous and Tertiary times by compressive stresses oriented roughly north–south. Inversion structures fall into two related categories. Regional upwarps overlie earlier graben...