Birth and Early evolution of a Jurassic Escarpment: Monte Kumeta, Western Sicily
The accurate reconstruction of the facies architecture in the Jurassic succession of Monte Kumeta, coupled with a detailed biostratigraphy, allow to define dynamics and genetic factors controlling the conversion of a Bahamian-type carbonate platform to a pelagic escarpment. A change from tidalites to oolites i.e. from the restricted, interior lagoon to a more open-marine sandy depositional environment, records the establishment of a basin south of the Monte Kumeta sector in late Hettangian-Sinemurian times. The oolitic limestones are overlain by earliest Carixian bioclastic grainstones and packstones with micritized grains and by wackestones with radiolarians and sponge spicules, organized …
Fe–Mn-encrusted “Kamenitza” and associated features in the Jurassic of Monte Kumeta (Sicily): subaerial and/or submarine dissolution?
Abstract An unusually jagged dissolution surface, capped by a thick Fe–Mn crust is well exposed in small quarry-cuts of the Jurassic of Monte Kumeta. It was formed on a crinoidal limestone substrate of Pliensbachian age, and is covered by Upper Bajocian Ammonitico Rosso-type sediments, all cross-cut by several generations of neptunian dykes. This peculiar surface is more or less coeval with hardgrounds, Fe–Mn-capped dissolution surfaces and associated neptunian dykes described from other localities of the Western Tethys and currently subject to fierce debates as to their purely submarine (or perhaps partly subaerial) origin. The major goal of this paper is to add new arguments to this debat…