Margaret Koo is a freelance illustrator and concept artist based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked for a variety of studios and companies such as East West Entertainment Studio and Koi Art Boutique, among others. She has also taught for a variety of art and design schools including Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, California. As an artist who loves the outdoors, she enjoys sketching and painting from life at any moment possible and discovering new ways to incorporate learning from the natural world around her.
In the RGWPM approach, the water availability (WA) is linked to groundwater flow and landscape features. The vast majority of landscapes result from physical and bio-chemical processes occurring in response to the interaction between the solid earth and the biosphere with surface water and groundwater. The discipline which addresses this interaction is hydrogeomorphology (e.g. Scheidegger 1973; Sidle and Onda 2004), which seeks to identify how different forms of water transform different landscapes. Landscapes with their specific geomorphic features can be understood as a snapshot of the cumulative interaction between the solid earth and the main fractions into which rainfall is transformed: surface runoff and infiltration, with infiltration subdivided into evapotranspiration and groundwater recharge. Hence, specific landscape features reveal both surface and groundwater dynamic processes. Scientists interested in the understanding of surface-water systems have long recognized that drainage basins are a fundamental hydrologic feature, controlled to a large extent by their geologic framework and climatic setting (Horton 1945; Leopold et al. 1964; Chorley et al. 1984). Groundwater flow is also governed by the geologic framework, climatic setting (Tóth 1963; Freeze and Witherspoon 1967) and interaction with surface waters, with aquifer systems considered as fundamental hydrogeologic units (Meinzer 1923; Heath 1984).
CGMW - Dynamic Sketching 1
It is largely recognized that seismotectonic activity in the eastern Southern Alps, lying east of the Schio-Vicenza fault system, is caused by the indentation of the main Adriatic plate [2] [3] [4] [5] , whereas a largely accepted geodynamic interpretation of the tectonic setting in the northern Italian area lying West of the Schio-Vicenza line, comprising the Padanian area and the surrounding Alpine and Apennine belts (Figure 1) is not yet available.
Various geodynamic interpretations have been proposed for the evolution of the Apennine belt, mainly involving subcrustal processes. The most cited model invokes the retreat of the Adriatic lithosphere subducted beneath the Apennine belt, possibly induced by slab pull or mantle flow, as the main driving mechanism of surface deformation [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] .
As concerns the tectonic setting in the Western Alps and the occurrence of major earthquakes in the Ligurian sea and in the western Swiss Alps (Figure 2), most of the geodynamic interpretations so far proposed [52] - [57] , invoke a poorly defined counterclockwise rotation of the northern Adriatic domain as the main driving mechanism. However, this hypothesis does not explain how the proposed behaviour of the northern Adria domain can be reconciled with other evidence about the kinematics of the Adria plate [39] . In this work, the deformation pattern of the Western Alps and the peculiar distribution of seismic activity are explained as an effect of redistribution of orogenic masses that accommodates the convergence of the Adria, Iberia and Eurasia plates.
A long study of the observed deformation pattern in the central Mediterranean region and the search of the geodynamic/tectonic context that may best account for the huge amount of evidence now available [1] [38] [43] - [51] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] led us to propose the evolutionary reconstruction shown in Figure 3. This interpretation suggests that tectonic activity in the central Mediterranean region has been driven by
In the geodynamic context that characterized the central Mediterranean region in the middle Miocene (Figure 3(a)), the minimum action principle required the Adriatic promontory to decouple from its northwestern protuberance (which was deeply embedded into the Western Alps) and start a roughly NNE ward motion (Figure 3(b)), at the expense of the structures that were present in the Carpatho-Pannonian area [38] [43] . Such decoupling was allowed by the reactivation, as a sinistral transpressional fault system, of the previous Giudicarie thrust zone [70] [71] . The separation between the western and eastern Padanian sectors at the Giudicarie discontinuity (and its presumed southwestward prosecution) has recently been suggested by [11] as well. The above interpretation is consistent with the fact that after the Giudicarie event accretion only occurred in the sector of the Alpine front which lay east of the Giudicarie fault system and the orientation of maximum shortening was perpendicular to the present thrust front in the Eastern Southern Alps [32] [69] [72] .
The space geodetic (GPS) observations obtained from about 760 continuous stations operating in the Italian region and surroundings from January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2015 have been analysed to estimate the present horizontal and vertical kinematic fields. The phase and pseudo-code data for each station have been analyzed by the GAMIT software version 10.5 [179] adopting a distributed procedure [180] as described by [45] [181] . The whole network has been divided into 43 clusters, following a simple geographic criterion, while maintaining the shortest possible baseline. Loose constraints (100 m) have been assigned to the daily position coordinates of each station belonging to all clusters. The International GPS service for Geodynamics (IGS) precise orbital solutions from Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center have been included in the processing with tight constraints, such as the Earth Orientation Parameter. The daily loosely constrained solutions have been combined into a unique solution by the GLOBK software [182] , and aligned into the ITRF2008 reference frame [183] by a weighted six parameters transformation (three translations and three rotations), using the ITRF2008 coordinates and velocities of the 13 high-quality common IGS stations shown in the inset of Figure 14.
On the other hand, the above kinematics can hardly be reconciled with the implications of the geodynamic hypothesis that invoke the gravitational sinking of the Adriatic subducted lithosphere beneath the Apennine belt as the main driving mechanism of surface tectonics. Above all, it must be considered that the development of the presumed slab roll-back and consequent trench retreat along the Apennine belt is described with considerable uncertainty in literature. In particular, most authors [25] [192] [193] suggest that the evidence of subducted lithosphere beneath the Apennine
This geodynamic context can plausibly explain why the major seismic sources (M > 5.5) of the region lying west of the Schio-Vicenza fault system are located in the Giudicarie zone, the outer front of the Northern Apennines, the offshore of the Ligurian coast and the Swiss Alps.
It must be pointed out that the proposed geodynamic interpretation is not compatible with the roughly SE-NW Africa-Eurasia convergence trend proposed by global kinematic models [204] [205] [206] , since it would not induce the constrictional regime in the southern France, Western Alps and western Padanian zone that can account for the observed shortening patterns. In particular, the above plate convergence cannot account for the sinistral transpressional regime observed in the Pyrenean belt. The roughly NW ward push of Africa, transmitted by the Alboran wedge, would rather imply a clockwise rotation of Iberia, which would produce an extensional regime in the Pyrenean belt. This remark integrates the discussions reported in previous works [1] [38] [39] [51] , which point out other major difficulties that one must face for reconciling the implications of the global kinematic models with primary evidence in the whole Mediterranean region. The above works also argue that any difficulty can be overcome if the Africa-Eurasia kinematic pattern proposed by [1] is adopted. 2ff7e9595c
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