Depositional architecture, paleogeographic setting and sequence stratigraphy of the Salento Peninsula from Paleogene to Pleistocene: an integration among field data, well logs and seismic lines

The Salento Peninsula constitutes an outcropping portion of the Apulia Carbonate Platform that was investigated through field analysis and a database of 350 wells and 90 seismic lines that was calibrated with 3 exploration wells in order to construct correlation panels and define paleogeographic schemes of this area during the Paleogene and Neogene. While the Adriatic and Ionic offshore sectors were investigated through 90 seismic lines and 3 exploration wells in order to connect data on land with those at sea to better define the stratigraphic architecture of the area. The Salento Peninsula constitutes the foreland sector of two chain belts migrating in opposite directions (the Dinarides-Albanides-Hellenides chain, moving from NE to SW, and the southern Apennines chain, moving from SW to NE), whose movements influenced the carbonate sedimentation and paleogeographic evolution of this area during the Cenozoic. The analyzed stratigraphic succession is constituted by a shallow-water carbonate sediments that were essentially deposited along reef complexes and variously articulated homoclinal ramps. These environments developed mainly along the eastern margin of the Peninsula and under the influence of the tectonic uplift/subsidence and eustatic sea level changes. This thesis proposes several paleogeographic schemes of the area and discusses how the interference between the two migrating chains, together with the eustatic sea-level changes, influenced the Cenozoic stratigraphic organization of the Salento Peninsula. Starting from the end of the Cretaceous, the Salento area experienced uplift and erosion, related to the flexural bending of the subducting lithosphere under the Dinarides-Albanides- Ellenides and southern Apennines belts respectively. This process produced an initial extensional fracturing and faulting in the uppermost part of the lithosphere during the Paleocene-early Eocene and an interruption of the shallow-water carbonate deposition; the latter was re-established starting from the middle-late Eocene up to the Pleistocene, with the onset of flexural subsidence, that became more accentuated during the Miocene. This process, together with the eustatic sea-level variations induced by the Cenozoic climatic changes, conditioned the carbonate sedimentation that is characterized by formal and informal lithostratigraphic units bounded by several unconformity surfaces constituting the expression of complete and incomplete simple and composite low- and high-rank depositional sequences. In this light, this thesis contributes to better define the stratigraphic architecture, the depositional, and paleogeographic setting of the Salento Peninsula for the last 60 Myrs.