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Between the years 1913 to 1914 the De Filippi Expedition, led by the Italian explorer and mountaineer Filippo De Filippi (1869–1938), traversed the Himalayan Range from Kashmir to Baltistan and Xinjiang. Exploring mostly unknown territories, traveling more than 2000 kilometers, and equipped with advanced instruments for geodetic and meteorological measurements, the expedition members surveyed, mapped and collected rocks and fossils including from the remote Aksai Chin region. After almost two years, the expedition returned to Italy, however, publication of the findings was delayed due to the outbreak of the First World War. The fossil material and syntheses of the geology and stratigraphy of the area represented unique documents on this sector of Western Tibet, with the Cretaceous Period being documented by the expedition for the first time in the whole Trans-Himalayan Range. The Aksai Chin region remains poorly explored even today, and the De Filippi collection which is housed in the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence now represents one of the few records available for reconstructing the stratigraphy of the area. It constitutes a valuable resource regarding the history of the scientific exploration and understanding of the geology and paleontology of the region, providing a unique window into a very remote and fascinating part of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Classic" field mapping in sedimentary successions, where lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and sedimentology meet, still has potential for producing answers to long‐standing problems in basin analysis. In the Northern Apennines of Italy, constraints on the slip rates of Early Jurassic rift faults, related to the embryonic separation of Eurasia and Gondwana, are provided by sedimentology and ammonite biostratigraphy, coupled with the field mapping of exposed tracts of the submarine escarpments and of the clinoform slopes which bordered carbonate footwall blocks. Slip rates of 600–1,000 m/Myr are here computed for Tethyan rift faults, producing >1 km of palaeostructural relief in ~2 million years (earliest Sinemurian: Bucklandi p.p. – Semicostatum p.p. zones). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a geological mapping project across the northern portion of the Simbruini Mts. (Latium-Abruzzi Domain – Central Apennines), where a thick Cretaceous and Miocene carbonate succession, followed by a thick upper Miocene terrigenous foredeep succession, is exposed. The terrigenous succession also includes a peculiar lithoclastic unit (‘brecce della Renga fm.’), whose sedimentation is linked to pre-orogenic (Tortonian-Messinian) extensional tectonics. The study area experienced late Messinian-early Pliocene compression, which is the Apennine chain building phase, followed by Quaternary post-orogenic extension, related to the opening of the Tyrrhenian basin. A geological map, at 1:20,000 scale, illustrates the main stratigraphic and structural features of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sedimentary successions exposed in northeast Calabria document the Jurassic–Early Cretaceous tectonic–sedimentary evolution of a former segment of the European–Iberian continental margin. They are juxtaposed today to units representing the deformation of the African and Adriatic plates margins as a product of Apenninic crustal shortening. A complex pattern of unconformities reveals a multi-stage tectonic evolution during the Early Jurassic, which affected the facies and geometries of siliciclastic and carbonate successions deposited in syn- and post-rift environments ranging from fluvial to deep marine. Late Sinemurian/Early Pliensbachian normal faulting resulted in exposure of the Hercynian basement at the sea-floor, which was onlapped by marine basin-fill units. Shallow-water carbonate aprons and reefs developed in response to the production of new accommodation space, fringing the newborn islands which represent structural highs made of Paleozoic crystalline and metamorphic rock. Their drowning and fragmentation in the Toarcian led to the development of thin caps of Rosso Ammonitico facies. Coeval to these deposits, a thick (> 1 km) hemipelagic/siliciclastic succession was sedimented in neighboring hanging wall basins, which would ultimately merge with the structural high successions. Footwall blocks of the Early Jurassic rift, made of Paleozoic basement and basin-margin border faults with their onlapping basin-fill formations, are found today at the hanging wall of Miocene thrusts, overlying younger (Middle/Late Jurassic to Late Paleogene) folded basinal sediments. This paper makes use of selected case examples to describe the richly diverse set of features, ranging from paleontology to sedimentology, to structural geology, which are associated with the field identification of basin-margin unconformities. Our data provide key constraints for restoring the pre-orogenic architecture of a continental margin facing a branch of the Liguria–Piedmont ocean in the Western Tethys, and for estimating displacements and slip rates along synsedimentary faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]