Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Marine and Petroleum Geology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpetgeo Research paper Carbonate/evaporitic sedimentation during the Messinian salinity crisis in active accretionary wedge basins of the northern Calabria, southern Italy Laurent Gindre-Chanu a , Mario Borrelli b,* , Antonio Caruso c , Salvatore Critelli b , Edoardo Perri b a Geosciences consultant, Dijon, France b Dipartimento di Biologia, Ecologia e Scienze della Terra, Università degli Studi della Calabria, Italy c Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e del Mare, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Carbonate sediments Evaporitic sediments Messinian salinity crisis Sea level changes Calabria ABSTRACT This work deals with Messinian deposits belonging to the Neogene infill of the Rossano and Belvedere Basins, respectively developed along the fore-arc and the back-arc areas of the north Calabria accretionary wedge. The main goal is to characterize the carbonate and evaporitic sedimentation during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, in the general framework of the basin architecture and the interplay between eustatic vs tectonic controlled sea- level variations. Fieldwork integrated with seismic lines and well logs interpretations led to the revision of the general stratigraphy of the basins and the proposal of a new sequential stratigraphic model driven by cyclic sea- level variations. Each cycle, repeated at least two times during the Messinian Salinity Crisis time frame, begins with a relative sea-level fall responsible for the emplacement of prograding wedges composed of terrigenous and evaporitic deposits that, subsequently, evolve in the deposition of primary basin-fill evaporites. This phase is followed by open marine transgression due to relative sea-level rise that terminates the evaporite formation and predates the development of microbial dominated carbonate platforms associated with shallow-water evapor- ites. Both basins experienced intense tectonic activity during the Messinian, which could be responsible for huge basinward sediments exportation and fast decreasing in the accommodation space. However, this did not sub- stantially influence the development of the systems tracts that, considering the basinal architecture, have been mainly controlled by eustatic sea-level variations. In fact, two major sea-level drops associated with basin re- striction and aridity (cold) conditions seem to have caused the origin of two main evaporitic units as basin-fill evaporites, while consequent sea-level rises and less stressed condition, account for two carbonate units with limited evaporites and terrigenous deposition. 1. Introduction The Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC) represents one of the most de- bated topics in the scientific community since the 70’, when the dis- covery of thick evaporitic bodies in the deep Mediterranean basin oc- curred (Hsü et al., 1973). Since then, numerous studies regarding this topic followed one another and helped to understand the controlling factors, such as the paleogeography, paleoenvironments, sedimentary processes and geodynamic setting, that deeply modified the Medi- terranean region in a relatively short time span of about 700 ky (e.g. Ryan and Cita, 1978; Clauzon et al., 1996; Krijgsman et al., 1999a, b; Lofi et al., 2011; Manzi et al., 2009, 2013; Roveri et al., 2014; Cornée et al., 2016). The Italian peninsula hosts important outcrops of Messinian de- posits that were constrained through time, such as in the Apennines (e.g. Vai, 1997; Krijgsman et al., 2001; Lugli et al., 2007, 2010) and in Sicily (e.g. Butler et al., 1995; Hilgen and Krijgsman, 1999; Bellanca et al., 2001; Rouchy and Caruso, 2006; Roveri et al., 2008b; Matano et al., 2014; Perri et al., 2017). However, in the Calabria region, despite the large and good quality outcrops of MSC, few studies have been undertaken (e.g. Lugli et al., 2007; Roveri et al., 2008b; Perri et al., 2017), maintaining this setting still quite obscure and rich of un- certainties in the scientific community. Moreover, the processes that control the occurrence of the carbonate platforms and evaporites during the MSC, their facies variability and depositional sequences along the syntectonic depositional profiles of the subducting Calabrian arc pro- vince, have received little attention (Zecchin et al., 2013) and no comparison between fore-arc and back arc structural domains have been undertaken. The onset of the MSC stratigraphic framework (from 5.97 to 5.6 My) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpetgeo.2019.104066 Received 19 August 2019; Received in revised form 26 September 2019; Accepted 28 September 2019 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: laurent.gindre17@gmail.com (L. Gindre-Chanu), mario.borrelli@unical.it (M. Borrelli). Marine and Petroleum Geology 112 (2020) 104066 Available online 08 October 2019 0264-8172/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T