Mechanical constraints on the chronology of fracture activation in folded Devonian sandstone of the western Moroccan Anti-Atlas

The three-dimensional meter-scale fracture networks, observed on exposed folds between the towns of Tata and Akka, western Moroccan Anti-Atlas, consist mostly of planar discontinuities, which are sub-perpendicular to the bedding and partitioned in three main sets. The chronology of their activation is proposed in five stages since the Hercynian orogeny. Stage 1 predates folding and involves the horizontal compression of the Emsian sandstone. It involves fracture set I, composed of systematic joints parallel to the direction of compression. Stages 2–4 correspond to the folding and are marked in the outer-arc by the activation of fracture set II, composed mainly of joints parallel to the fold axial plane. Stage 5 is a regional shear event during which sets I and III, separated by an angle close to 60°, are activated in a conjugate manner. To throw light on the recurrent difficulty in discriminating between activation of inherited and new fractures, an elasto-plastic model is used to construct a stress path in the pervasively fractured medium idealized as a continuum. Each fracture set obeys the Mohr–Coulomb criterion truncated in tension to describe both sliding and opening activations. Finite-element simulations of a simple buckling event accounting for the field fracture sets are presented. It is shown that set I cannot be generated by folding and thus does belong to stage 1. Set II is activated at a later stage of folding than expected from the field interpretation. Set III cannot be activated during stage 2, confirming its role in stage 5. The advantages and limitations of the proposed modeling are finally discussed.