Ricerc@Sapienza

Temperature-dependent clay minerals and vitrinite reflectance data, surface and subsurface geological constraints were used to unravel the burial evolution of the Ordovician-Quaternary sedimentary successions from the inner to the outer zones of the Zagros fold-and-thrust belt in the Fars province (Iran). These sedimentary successions were buried to their thermal maxima during early to late diagenesis, achieving temperatures corresponding to the immature to early mature stages of hydrocarbon generation.

Temperature-dependent clay mineral assemblages, vitrinite reflectance, and one dimensional (1-D) thermal and three- dimensional (3-D) geological modeling of a Neogene wedge-top basin in the Sicilian fold-and-thrust belt and its pre-orogenic substratum allowed us to: (1) define the burial history of the sedimentary succession filling the wedge-top basin and its substratum, (2) reconstruct the wedge-top basin geometry, depocenter migration, and sediment provenance through time in the framework of a source-to-sink system, and (3) shed new light into the kinematic evolution of the Apennine-Magh

Wedge-top basins can provide highly sensitive information on the uplift and erosion history of an evolving collisional belt, but their burial and thermal history has generally been neglected because their siliciclastic infill records the very low temperature history, which is difficult to detect. This paper provides an integrated approach for defining the first order tectonic events shaping the southern Apennines in Neogene times through the study of a wedge-top basin.