Yverdon-les-Bains is situated at the western tip of Lake Neuchatel in the southwestern part of the Molasse Basin and its transition to the Jura Mountains in the north (Fig. 1). The Jura Mountains are composed of limestone and marl rocks, which experienced passive transport and folding processes during the Alpine orogeny resulting in the typical fold-and-thrust structure of the Jura arc. This process also slightly deformed the Molasse Basin, a sedimentary foreland basin running sub-parallel to the Alpine front.
Two families of transpressive faults dominate the Yverdon-les-Bains area (Fig.1): 1) EW-oriented, right-lateral thrust faults, forming the 18 km-long Pipechat–Chamblon–Chevressy (PCC) fault zone; and 2) NS-oriented, left-lateral thrusts, like the western Chamblon (C) and Rances-Pipechat (RP) thrusts. The Pipechat and Chamblon mountains were lifted up along these complex thrust fault arrangements, exposing older carbonate rocks in the younger sedimentary rocks of the Molasse Basin [Jordi, 1993; Muralt et al.,1997; Pronk, 2009].