The Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees correspond to a Lower Cretaceous rift system including both oceanic and hyperextended rift domains. The transition from preserved oceanic and rift domains in the West to their complete inversion in the East enables us to study the progressive reactivation of a hyperextended rift system. We use seismic interpretation, gravity inversion, and field mapping to identify and map former rift domains and their subsequent reactivation. We propose a new map and sections across the system illustrating the progressive integration of the rift domains into the orogen. This study aims to provide insights on the formation of hyperextended rift systems and discuss their role during reactivation. Two spatially and temporally distinct rift systems can be distinguished: the Bay of Biscay-Parentis and the Pyrenean-Basque-Cantabrian rifts. While the offshore Bay of Biscay represent a former mature oceanic domain, the fossil remnants of hyperextended domains preserved onshore in the Pyrenean-Cantabrian orogen record distributed extensional deformation partitioned between strongly segmented rift basins. Reactivation initiated in the exhumed mantle domain before it affected the hyperthinned domain. Both domains accommodated most of the shortening. The final architecture of the orogen is acquired once the conjugate necking domains became involved in collisional processes. The complex 3-D architecture of the initial rift system may partly explain the heterogeneous reactivation of the overall system. These results have important implications for the formation and reactivation of hyperextended rift systems and for the restoration of the Bay of Biscay and Pyrenean domains.

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[1] Many recent papers describe the structure of the Iberia and Newfoundland rifted margins; however, none of them propose kinematic restorations of the complete rift system to quantify the amount of extension necessary to exhume mantle and initiate seafloor spreading. In our study, we use two pairs of cross sections considered as conjugate lines: one across the Galicia Bank-Flemish Cap and the other across the Southern Iberia Abyssal Plain-Flemish Pass. Both transects have been imaged by reflection-and refraction-seismic methods and have been drilled during Ocean Drilling Program Legs 103, 149, 173, and 210. Drilling penetrated parts of the rift stratigraphy and the underlying basement. The cross sections can therefore be considered as the best-documented conjugate transects across present-day hyperextended, magma-poor rifted margins. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) provide a detailed description of the crustal architecture of the two conjugate sections, (2) define the extensional structures and their ages, and (3) quantify the amount of strain and strain rate accommodated along these lines. This paper proposes a quantitative description of extension along the Iberia-Newfoundland rift system and discusses the limitations and problems in quantifying extensional deformation along hyperextended rifted margins.