Depositional and diagenetic facies of Late Pleistocene (MIS 5) shallow-marine carbonates of the Capo Colonna terrace, Crotone Basin, Southern Italy (preliminary data)

Salvatore Guerrieri, Pierluigi Santagati¹, Mario Borrelli & Edoardo Perri^1
1Università della Calabria - Dipartimento di Biologia, Ecologia e Scienze della Terra.
Corresponding author e-mail: salvatoreguerrieri44@gmail.com

The Capo Colonna (Crotone, Italy) marine terrace succession shows a complex sedimentary organization of the MIS 5 marine deposits revealing a general eastward deepening of the facies. The succession starts with basal conglomerate passing eastward to a shell bed. Upward, is present an algal calcirudite (mäerl facies) grading eastward to small red algae bioconstructions (coralligenous facies) with Lithophaga boreholes. These deposits are topped by large algal bioconstructions dominated by crustose red algae, bryozoans and serpulids, with subordinate corals, echinoids, and molluscs. The bioconstructions are surrounded by bioclastic sandstones. The succession is then closed by cross stratified sandstones. The algal bioconstructions were investigated in detail, revealing at the microscale the presence of red algae bindstones, bryozoan boundstones and, serpulid boundstones. It also includes red algae rich grainstones/packstones (related sediments); packstones and wackstones/mudstones (framework infillings). Moreover, this facies association was widely interested by early cementation phenomena, including microbialitic ones, both in the bioconstructed bodies and in the related sediments.

Late Pleistocene, Coralligenous, microfacies, microbialites.