Middle Pleistocene extinction process of pull-apart basins along the North Anatolian Fault Zone

Numerous basins that present in northern Turkey formed in Plio-Quaternary period by the strike-slip tectonics of the North Anatolian Fault Zone. These pull-apart basins isolated from their surrounding topographies by major scarps of faults along their margins that mapped as active faults. But the mapped recent traces in the pull-apart basins are in disagreement about these marginal faults and commonly characterized by the faults that pass through basin floors in the cases of surface rupturings in great earthquakes during the last century. These faults have migrated from the basin rims to the center of the basins in agreement with the extinction model of pull-apart basins. Here we review observations about numerous basins along the North Anatolian Fault Zone to show that the migration of these faults in Middle Pleistocene related with the maturity of basins through their evolution.