C. Hübscher

The southern Baltic Sea is a peculiar area, where the Sorgenfrei‐Tornquist Zone (STZ), stretching from Bornholm into the North Sea, connects to the Teisseyre‐Tornquist Zone (TTZ) that continues SE up to the Black Sea. In this study, we show the structure and evolution of this controversially debated area, both on crustal and basin scale, by using three seismic reflection profiles combined with 2‐D potential field data. The results demonstrate that the southern Baltic Sea is underlain by a thick crust of the East European Craton with a Moho depth in the range of 38–42 km. The overall crustal architecture is shaped by three phases of localized stretching in the early Paleozoic, Devonian‐Carboniferous, and Permian‐Mesozoic. The most spectacular feature of the southern Baltic Sea is a zone of thick‐skinned compressional deformation produced by Late Cretaceous‐early Paleogene inversion, including a system of thrusts and back thrusts penetrating the entire crust in an 80–90 km wide inversion zone. ENE‐vergent thrusts are traced from the top of the Cretaceous down to the Moho and they are accompanied by back thrusts of opposite vergence, also reaching the Moho. Inversion tectonics resulted in the uplift of a block of cratonic crust as a pop‐up structure, bounded by thrusts and back thrusts, and the displacement of the Moho within the STZ and TTZ. The similar mechanism of intra‐cratonic inversion was recognized for the Donbas Foldbelt in eastern Ukraine, and it may be characteristic of rigid cratons, where deformation is localized in a few preexisting zones of weakness.