14 July 2017

Friday fold: chevrons in the Scaglia Rossa, Apennines

Posted by Callan Bentley

It’s Friday, and I’m back in the States after a wonderful month of traipsing around Europe. I spent the final 5 days of my journey with my friend Alan Pitts of the University of Camerino, examining the geology of Le Marche, a province in central-east Italy. One of the sites we saw was this cliff of chevron-folded layers of limestone + limy shale. The unit is the Scaglia Rossa, which spans the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary in the Apennines. The folding probably dates to the Miocene, which is the age of the turbidites in the neighboring Camerino Basin, which was orogenically-initiated.

They are beautiful, and remind me strongly of similarly aged and deformed chert layers at Marin Headlands in California.

These charismatic structures were chosen for the front cover of Ernesto Centamore’s and Giovannie Deiana’s La Geologia Della Marche, a volume on the geology of Le Marche:

Happy Friday, all!