Tectonic and climatic controls on sedimentation in Late Miocene Cortemaggiore Wedge-Top Basin (Northwestern Apennines, Italy)

At the foothills of the north-western Apennines, the Corternaggiore Wedge-Top Basin (CWTB) is bounded by the buried and arcuate Corternaggiore anticline, to the north, and by the polyphased and complex Salsomaggiore tectonic window, to the south. The CWTB started to form in response to a late Tortonian tectonic pulse that uplifted the Corternaggiore anticline and established euxinic conditions. A major intraMessinian tectonic pulse further shortened the CWTB and triggered the emplacement of gravity-driven mass-wasting deposits above which turbiditic, shelfal deposits evolve upward to fluvio-cleltaic deposits. The former, Late Messinian hypohaline succession, is characterized by a well-developed cyclical pattern which falls in the range of astronomically-controlled climate changes with precessional periodicity modulated by obliquity and eccentricity periodicity. Tectonic and climate controls on sedimentary succession of the CWTB act at different frequencies. Based on the refined and high-resolution late Miocene chronostratigraphy of coeval Mediterranean sedimentary succession, it is possible to time constrain the tectonic and climatic events and their cyclicity. Tectonics control acts at low frequency (order of 2 Myr) and produces major and fast morphologic changes of the basin. Climate acts at variable higher frequency (order of 20-100 kyr); it both distributes laterally and stacks vertically and cyclically the sediment supplied to transport by erosion of tectonically uplifted rocks. The tectonic and climatic controls should have acted concomitantly over the entire Northern Apennines foreland basin system and the Mediterranean area, because cyclicity and depositional characters of late Miocene succession present common features. Tectonic uplift causes basin-wide hydrologic and hydrogeologic changes that might induce increased evaporation; in the CWTB, two drier climate events, corresponding to the lower and upper evaporites of the Mediterranean region, are closely preceded by tectonic pulses. However, during late Miocene, climate changes occurred also outside the Mediterranean region. Thus, it is argued that the 2 Myr is a periodicity common both to tectonics pulses and climate changes; it is a low-frequency cyclicity that, related to astronomical forces, drives simultaneous action of tectonic pulses and climate changes within the CWTB.