Pliocene marls white as snow in southern Sicily

SCIACCA, SICILY, ITALY–Our last stop of the day on this International Bryozoology Association pre-conference field trip was to a massive outcrop of foraminiferan-rich marls known as the Trubi. A view of the cliffs with the sun setting behind them is above.

My colleague (and roommate on this trip) Hans Arne Nakrem is serving as a scale to show the regular cyclicity of these marls. Appropriately, he is from snowy northern Norway. These sediments were deposited immediately after the Messinian Salinity Crisis when the entire Mediterranean was reduced to a shallow series of evaporitive ponds. These marls mark the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar which flooded the Mediterranean Basin with normal seawater (the Zanclean Flood) 5.33 million years ago.

I wish I had better lighting to show just how brightly white these rocks are. They are now used as the base type section of the Zanclean Stage.

Here is a late addition to this post (June 23, 2013). I collected some sand from the beach in front of these chalky rocks. A close-up image is shown above. Note that the chalk itself is eroded so quickly that it leaves no trace in the sand. We see here mostly rounded quartz grains and shell fragments.