Chartreuse

The Chartreuse area is a range of hills north of the city of Grenoble. It contains extellent large scale exposures of thrust and fold geometry. This site provides a flavour of these structures.

The Chartreuse lies where the Jura fold and thrust belt converges and merges with the Subalpine chains, thus terminating the Annecy basin southwards.

The area is domiated by big cliff-lines of continuous bands of Urgonian limestone, commonly more than 200m thick.  The Urgonian unit is repeated by succesive thrust structures. These are evident on the cross-section below. Use the buttons on the section to navigate into field locations where you will find small-scale structures and structural data to plot.

You will be able to predict the geometry of a fold (at St. Christophe) and by collating the fault kinematic data (plot those for the Voreppe, Corbel and Central Chartreuse thrusts together), suggest the direction of thrusting.