The Carboneras Fault or Carboneras Fault Zone is major sinistral (left-lateral)

strike-slip fault In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

in the

Province of Almería Almería (, also , ) is a province of the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. It is bordered by the provinces of Granada, Murcia, and the Mediterranean Sea. Its capital is the homonymous city of Almería. Almería has an area of . With 701, ...

, southern Spain. It has a NE–SW trend and forms part of the Eastern Betic Shear Zone. It extends for about 50 km onshore, but is interpreted to continue offshore into the

Alboran Sea The Alboran Sea (from Arabic , ''al-Baḥrān'') is the westernmost portion of the Mediterranean Sea, lying between the Iberian Peninsula and the north of Africa (Spain on the north and Morocco and Algeria on the south). The Strait of Gibraltar, w ...

for at least a further 90 km. It is thought to be

seismically active An active fault is a fault (geology), fault that is likely to become the source of another earthquake sometime in the future. Geologists commonly consider faults to be active if there has been movement observed or evidence of seismic activity duri ...

and movement on the offshore part of this fault may have been responsible for the

1522 Almería earthquake The 1522 Almería earthquake ( es, link=no, Terremoto de Almería de 1522) was a major seismic event estimated to be 6.8–7.0 that occurred on September 22. The epicenter was in the capital of Almeria in the Andarax Valley, near Alhama de A ...

References

Seismic faults of Europe Geology of Spain {{geophysics-stub