Diagenesis of Miocene, incised valley-filling limestones; Provence, Southern France

Abstract

The Cenozoic of southeastern France is characterized by a series of incised valleys that were filled by a succession of marine carbonate and then siliciclastic sediments culminating in the modern Rhone River depositional system. The earliest of these paleovalleys (Miocene — Burdigalian) is located in the Pernes Hills between the towns of Saumane and Venasque. It was filled by a succession of marine carbonates in the form of two third-order stratigraphic sequences (S1 and S2) and three fourth-order subsequences (S1a, S1b and S1c). The deposits are heterozoan throughout, composed of echinoids, bryozoans, coralline algae, mollusks, and benthic foraminifers. They comprise a succession of spectacular cross-bedded calcarenites that accumulated in the seaward part of a tide-dominated estuary. Diagenesis is interpreted to have taken place in four stages: 1) minor synsedimentary precipitation of inclusion-rich carbonate cements, 2) shallow burial physical and chemical compaction, 3) subaerial exposure and widespread precipitation of clear, zoned, epitaxial and isopachous, followed by subsequent clear, unzoned, calcite cements and, 4) prolonged subaerial exposure (middle Miocene to Holocene), that involved dissolution, karstification, and precipitation of minor clear and locally pendant calcite cement. The rocks were essentially uncemented during shallow burial only to be well lithified during the early phases of subsequent telogenesis. The main controls on such lithification are interpreted to have been: 1) the dissolution of minor aragonite biofragments and precipitation of some LMC cement, 2) the abundance of echinoid particle nuclei for epitaxial cement nucleation, and 3) increasing rainfall together with regional tectonic uplift to the east that resulted in increased subsurface water flow. This study not only emphasizes the variable paragenesis of calcite-rich, heterozoan carbonates but also highlights the utility of these Cenozoic limestones with extant components as models for the diagenesis of older Paleozoic limestones that formed in shallow calcite seas.