Permian-Cenozoic deep-water carbonate rocks of the Southern Tethyan Domain. The case of Central Sicily

We present an integrated stratigraphy of the outcropping andburied Permian-Cenozoic deep-water carbonate successions, formingsome of the tectonic units mostly buried beneath the Late Neogenesedimentary cover in the fold and thrust belt of Central Sicily.Three main successions, pertaining to the well known Lercara,Imerese and Sicanian domains, have been reconstructed on the basisof a detailed facies analysis, seismostratigraphic interpretation, bio -stratigraphy (mostly based on palynological data) and comparisonbetween outcropping and subsurface deep-water sediments.The main results reveal a continuous sedimentation of the deepwaterSouthern Tethyan Sicilian succession since the Permian toCenozoic. In detail: a) the Permian-Middle Triassic terrigenous andcarbonate deep-water successions, outcropping or buried in theCerda, Lercara-Roccapalumba and Sosio Valley regions, are wellcomparable to each other and represent the common substrate ofthe Mesozoic-Paleogene Imerese and Sicanian carbonate successions;b) the Mesozoic-Paleogene deep-water carbonates, when comparedamong them, reveal the occurrence of different sedimentarysuccessions (Imerese and Sicanian); c) the Oligo-Miocene forelandbasin terrigenous sediments (Numidian flysch) clearly differ fromthe coeval foreland pelagic to open-shelf carbonates.The paleogeographic reconstruction envisages: a) during thePermian-Triassic, a wide subsident continental rifting area, borderedby a shallow-water domain periodically supplying the basin with calciturbiditicto gravity flows sedimentation (rift stage of the SouthernTethyan margin); b) during the Jurassic-Paleogene, two differentdeep-water basins developed in a context of a post-rift stage. The differentsedimentation reflects the location of the Imerese and Sica -nian basins, respectively, along adjacent rimmed shelf and steppedcarbonate platform margins.