Glacier melting triggers massive gravel deposition in central Italy's river basins, unveiling deglacial events from 1.25 to 0.78 Ma

DOI

We provide a dataset of 40Ar/39Ar age constraints for seven samples of sedimentary deposits recovered from a 120 m deep borehole drilled in the city of Rome in the year 2022. Twenty to thirty sanidine crystals were separated from the sandy matrix of the gravel beds obtained from the borehole. Each gravel bed is part of an aggradational succession deposited in response to sea-level rise in the delta of the Paleo-Tiber River during the late Lower Pleistocene. These aggradational successions are characterized by a sharp boundary that separates a layer of well-rounded limestone and chert pebbles, with diameters reaching up to approximately 10 cm, embedded in a matrix of silty sand (0.5-1.0 mm). This layer is distinct from another layer of mostly clayey (<0.004 mm) and sandy (<0.5 mm) sediments that is several meters thick. Based on the conceptual model of aggradational successions proposed by Marra et al. (2016, doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2016.05.037), the sharp sedimentary boundaries are used as a proxy for glacial terminations. The achieved geochronologic constraints allow for an overall good correlation between each aggradational succession, represented by the basal coarse gravel abruptly transitioning to sandy clay sediments, and each period of sea-level rise inferred from the d18O curve in the interval encompassing MIS 19 through MIS 37, 780 through 1250 ka.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.963933
Related Identifier References https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016.05.037
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.963933
Provenance
Creator Florindo, Fabio ORCID logo; Marra, Fabrizio ORCID logo; Jicha, Brian; Bulian, Francesca ORCID logo; Di Chiara, Anita; Srivastava, Priyeshu
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2024
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 32 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (12.520W, 41.920S, 12.530E, 41.970N); Italy