Association of tepees and palaeokarst in the Ladinian Calcare Rosso (Southern Alps, Italy)
Authors: MUTTI MARIA 
Published: June 2006

The Ladinian Calcare Rosso of the Southern Alps provides a rare opportunity to examine the temporal relationships between tepees and palaeokarst. This unit comprises peritidal strata pervasively deformed into tepees, repeatedly capped by palaeokarst surfaces mantled by terra rossa. Palaeokarsts, characterized by a regional distribution across the Southern Alps, occur at the base and at the top of the unit. Local palaeokarsts, confined to this part of the platform, occur within the Calcare Rosso and strongly affected depositional facies.

Tepee deformation ranges from simple antiformal structures (peritidal tepees) to composite breccias floating in synsedimentary cements and internal sediments (senile tepees). Peritidal tepees commonly occur at the top of one peritidal cycle, in association with subaerial exposure at the cycle top, while senile tepees affect several peritidal cycles, and are always capped by a palaeokarst surface. Cements and internal sediments form up to 80% of the total rock volume of senile tepees. The paragenesis of senile tepees is extremely complex and records several, superimposed episodes of dissolution, cement precipitation (fibrous cements, laminated crusts, mega‐rays) and deposition of internal sediments (marine sediment and terra rossa).

Petrographical observations and stable isotope geochemistry indicate that cements associated with senile tepees precipitated in a coastal karstic environment under frequently changing conditions, ranging from marine to meteoric, and were altered soon after precipitation in the presence of either meteoric or mixed marine/meteoric waters. Stable isotope data for the cements and the host rock show the influence of meteoric water (average δ18O= ‐ 5·8‰), while strontium isotopes (average87Sr/86Sr=0·707891) indicate that cements were precipitated and altered in the presence of marine Triassic waters.

Field relationships, sedimentological associations and paragenetic sequences document that formation of senile tepees was coeval with karsting. Senile tepees formed in a karst‐dominated environment in the presence of extensive meteoric water circulation, in contrast to previous interpretations that tepees formed in arid environments, under the influence of vadose diagenesis. Tepees initiated in a peritidal setting when subaerial exposure led to the formation of sheet cracks and up‐buckling of strata. This porosity acted as a later conduit for either meteoric or mixed marine/meteoric fluids, when a karst system developed in association with prolonged subaerial exposure. Relative sea level variations, inducing changes in the water table, played a key role in exposing the peritidal cycles to marine, mixed marine/meteoric and meteoric diagenetic environments leading to the formation of senile tepees.

The formation and preservation in the stratigraphic record of vertically stacked senile tepees implies that they formed during an overall period of transgression, punctuated by different orders of sea level variations, which allowed formation and later freezing of the cave infills.