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1 Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università ‘Federico II’, Largo San Marcellino, 10, 80138, Napoli, Italy
2 Istituto di Ricerca, Geomare Sud, CNR, via A. Vespucci 9, 80142, Napoli, Italy
3 Department of Geological Sciences, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL48AA, UK
Lower Cretaceous limestones and dolomites drilled at Monte Raggeto, north of Naples, show a hierarchical organization in cycles, bundles and superbundles, similar to that found in other Cretaceous shallow-water carbonate rocks exposed in the Southern Apennines. These cycles have been interpreted as being caused by the influences of planetary orbital perturbations of the Earth (precession, obliquity), with the bundles and superbundles being considered to represent the short- and long-term eccentricity orbital cycles, respectively. The palaeomagnetic properties of an 88 m core (corresponding to a total interval of c. 3.2 Ma with a rock accumulation rate averaging 1 cm per 360 ± 16 years) were determined at 2 cm intervals. These show the same spectral periodicities as for the sedimentary properties determined at 1 cm intervals, but there are no correlations between these sedimentological and palaeomagnetic sets of data, when analysed on the scale of the bore-core. An example is given of a 15.50 m length of the bore-core, comprising a single superbundle corresponding to one of the long eccentricity terms, and including eight elementary cycles (each topped by a brief emersion episode) grouped in three bundles. These shallow marine carbonate sediments underwent very early diagenesis accompanied by marine cementation in the pore spaces at or immediately below the water-sediment interface in the same way as in modern-day tropical-subtropical environments. During brief emersions at the top of each cycle, meteoric early diagenesis also occurred. All non-carbonate grains that were present in the original sediment, including ferromagnetic ones, are likely to have been cemented in during these very early phases of diagenesis. It is concluded that the studied interval provides a model of the diagenetic evolution of the whole core, where the early diagenesis controlled the locking-in of a nearly continuous record of the geomagnetic field behaviour for the the entire core. Thus depositional, diagenetic and palaeomagnetic properties can be used in conjunction to provide detailed information on the environmental variations and geomagnetic field behaviour during the evolution of this stratigraphic sequence at an ultra-fine resolution, as 1 cm of rock is equivalent, on average, to 360 ± 16 years.
