Anatomy and emplacement mechanism of a large submarine slide within a Miocene foredeep in the northern Apennines, Italy: A field perspective

Abstract

The Casaglia Monte della Colonna (CMC) body, from the middle Miocene Marnoso-arenacea Formation of the Northern Apennines, covering more than 350 square kilometers, provides a rare opportunity to study the geometry and the internal deformation of a large, basin-wide submarine landslide. Although the head zone of the landslide has not been preserved, the body has a transitional zone, a contractional ramp cutting off more than 200 meters of the footwall stratigraphic succession, and a very wide lobe spilling over onto the adjoining basin plain deposits. The extent of the body, the depth of the ramp cut-off and the widening of the lobe are comparable with the largest present-day submarine landslides, not often observed in fossil examples. Internal deformation structures are distributed differently in the ramp and lobe zones. The ramp zone has antiformal stacking of duplexes and steeply inclined folds. The lobe has a well-defined strain partition: the upper part of the body is affected by extensional structures such as listric normal faults and extensional duplexes; the lower part is deformed by recumbent folds, boudinage and stacking of blocks, which are compatible with flow-induced, heterogeneous simple shear. This distribution is consistent with a kinematic model of extrusion-spreading, implying rear compression in the ramp zone with thickening and shortening of the body, and spreading in the lobe with thinning and stretching. The localized buckling present in the distal part of the lobe may be related to the onset of lateral confinement, due to local topographic features of the basin plain (synsedimentary intrabasinal high). The various degrees and styles of stratal disruption in the mass wasting body depend on the different combination of progressive simple shear, layer-parallel extension and shortening. Different structural associations occur in well-defined parts of the body due to kinematics of emplacement (spreading, flow and buckling). These associations may be diagnostic of gravitational mass wasting processes rather than shallow-level tectonic deformation.