DEPOSITIONAL PATTERNS AND THEIR TECTONIC CONTROLS WITHIN THE PLIOQUATERNARY CARBONATE SANDS AND MUDS OF ONSHORE AND OFFSHORE SE SICILY (ITALY)

The Straits of Sicily represent an important bathymetric gateway betwe en the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. Plio-Quaternary seabed sedim ents consist of muds together with carbonate sands. These are contrast ed with two onshore analogues from Sicily in order to better understan d the linked tectonic and palaeoenvironmental controls on deposition. For one analogue, coastal packstones composed of fragmented shelly fau na that build large parasequences, the facies fractionation was domina ntly controlled by wave and storm activity. The other analogue, bryozo a-rich packstones deposited on a shelf, are inferred to have been frac tionated from muds by marine current activity below wavebase. These Pl iocene shelf packstones and basinal muds are the favoured ancient anal ogue for modern offshore sedimentation and may record important palaeo -oceanographic data that reconstruct mixing between the ancestral West ern and Eastern Mediterranean water. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. Al l rights reserved.