Effects of high-frequency Pleistocene sea-level changes on a highly deforming continental margin: Calabrian shelf (southern Tyrrhenian sea, Italy)

ontinental margin detected approximately 100 meters of tbc shelves internal structure, allowing us to reconstruct tbc accretionary mechanisms of tbc continental margin and to define tbc interplay between slope failure and sedimentation during the Upper Pleistocene. Because of tbc particular geodynamic setting of the Calabrian Are, the confinental margin, which shows a very immature physiography, underwent severe deformation that is ascribed mainly to large-scale slope failure. High-frequeney sca level changes during tbc Pleistocene triggered tbc outbuilding of tbc shelf, causing a discontinuous frontal accretion of the margin. During eustatic lowstands, very high sedimentation rates accumulated extremely thick sequences in tbc basins (not surveyed in this study), while on the slope, oblique prograding sequences were emplaced by massive subaqueous channelled transport. During highstand conditions, on the other hand, sedimentation was mainly confined to the shelf, as it is on tbc present-day post-glacial wcdge, while non-depositional surfaces were created on the starved continental slope. Because of tbc continuous deformation of tbc margin, tbc seismic units bounded by such non depositional surfaces, corresponding to high-order depositional sequences, show a marked stratal disconformity and a deformation degree increasing discontinuously with age.