What is the precise age of the basaltic volcanoes in the Hron River drainage basin? Could basaltic effusions have changed the paleo-Hron River’s path or decelerated its incision rate? An international team of researchers from Slovakia, Australia and Austria is looking to answer these (and many other) questions.
Sporadic effusions of basaltic lavas are the youngest manifestations of volcanic activity in central Slovakia. Near Ostrá Lúka and Brehy (Nová Baňa) villages, basaltic lavas touch the valley or channel of the Hron River and most likely interacted with the paleo-river in the geological past. The basaltic volcano Putikov vršok near Nova Baňa is also well known as the youngest volcano in Slovakia, though its exact age was highly uncertain, ranging from about 100 ka to almost 450 ka, depending on the dating approach. In the latest paper by Prokešová et al. (2024), the authors concurrently applied several dating methods and DEM-based morphometric techniques to refine the ages of basalts at both localities and look for topographic signatures of interactions between them and the Hron River. Their results challenge the previously accepted very young age (ca. 100 ka) of the Putikov Vŕšok volcano, suggest a delayed incision of the Hron River in the Neovolcanic area in the Late Pleistocene, and point to the possible changes in the river route in the Late Miocene induced by massive Ostrá Lúka basalt complex.
The paper is the outcome of collaboration between researchers from the Institute of Geography of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava, Curtin University in Perth and Vienna University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU).
The article Late Cenozoic alkali basalts and their interactions with the paleo-Hron River (Western Carpathians): New insights from geochronology and fluvial morphometric indices was published in Geomorphology – IF 2022: 3.1
The article is part of the research project:
- VEGA 2/0052/21: “Land surface topography – a source of data on the tectonic evolution of
the Western Carpathians in the Pliocene Quaternary period“
Text: Róberta Prokešová
