
Fabrizio FellettiUniversity of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Earth Sciences "Ardito Desio"
Fabrizio Felletti
Geology
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130
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Introduction
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January 2004 - April 2018
Publications
Publications (130)
The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the performance of the IchnoGIS method, which is a high-resolution framework to capture, manage, analyse and display geographically referenced ichnological data. By surveying neoichnological, sedimentological and environmental variables, the IchnoGIS method allows users to identify the environmental f...
The field trip illustrates the changes in the late Eocene-Miocene depositional systems filling the Tertiary Piedmont Basin in response to major palaeogeographic reorganizations linked to the evolution of the Alpine-Apennine tectonic junction. During days 1st-2nd-3rd the field trip aims to show some key outcrops of the southwestern part of the basin...
For over 50 years, turbidite channel-levée complexes have been studied in various modern and ancient deep-water turbidite systems. Despite recent advancements in high-resolution 3D seismic imaging, their internal facies complexity remains elusive. Well-exposed outcrops are crucial in bridging this gap, as they offer insight into fine-scale facies h...
The sedimentary architecture of channelised turbidites can be highly complex as it reflects the response of submarine channels to several interplaying factors, both allocyclic and autocyclic. Although largely studied through seismic imaging, turbidite channel fills are not satisfactorily understood for sedimentary facies and small-scale architectur...
Although poorly studied in the sedimentary record, deposits of sediment gravity flows generated at river mouths are being increasingly recognised as an important component of deep-water clastic successions. Yet, distinguishing them from surge-like turbidites might be problematic and requires accurate facies and architectural analyses besides the th...
Turbidite channel-levée complexes have been the focus of extensive research from a number of modern and ancient deep-water turbidite systems over more than fifty years. Although high-resolution 3D-seismic studies have recently yielded unprecedented imaging of these deposits, their internal facies complexity remains elusive. To fill this gap, extens...
The sedimentary architecture of channelised turbidites can be highly complex as it reflects the response of submarine channels to several interplaying factors. Although largely studied through seismic imaging, turbidite channel fills are not definitely calibrated for sedimentary facies and small-scale architectures at a sub-seismic scale.
This con...
Turbidite channel-levée complexes have been the focus of extensive research from a number of modern and ancient deep-water turbidite systems over more than fifty years. Although high-resolution 3D seismic studies have recently yielded unprecedented imaging of these deposits, the internal facies complexity of a channel-levée complex remains elusive....
The sedimentary architecture of channelized turbidites can be highly complex as it reflects the response of submarine channels to several interplaying factors. Although intensively investigated through seismic imaging, turbidite channel fills are not convincingly calibrated for sedimentary facies at a sub‐seismic scale. This contribution addresses...
This petrographic database is a compilation made to study the Oligocene-Langhian succession of the Arquata Scrivia area, consisting of different shallow to deep-water marine sedimentary units deposited in the eastern Tertiary Piedmont Basin (NW Italy). This database is unique for the studied succession, which was not priorly investigated for the pe...
This contribution reports on the outcrop of one (Complex 6, hereafter) of multiple
turbidite channel-levée complexes making the Tachrift system (Late Tortonianearly
Messinian), beautifully exposed in NE Morocco as part of the clastic fill of
the Taza-Guercif Basin. Geological mapping was integrated with facies analysis
on 46 logs and physical strat...
The Italian Northern Apennines are acknowledged as the place where ichnology was born, but there is comparatively little work about their ichnological record. This study bridges this gap by describing two new ichno-sites from the locality of Pierfrancesco, which preserve an abundant, low-disparity trace-fossil assemblage within the Late Cretaceous...
Basal interaction beneath frontally-emergent mass-transport deposits has been widely documented in seismic data, but its effect on deposit heterogeneity not convincingly calibrated at outcrop. Several blocky mass-transport deposits occur as part of the Late Eocene Ventimiglia Flysch of north-west Italy, comprising slope-derived marlstones, represen...
Ichnofossils, the fossilized products of life-substrate interactions, are among the most abundant biosignatures on Earth and therefore they may provide scientific evidence of potential life that may have existed on Mars. Ichnofossils offer unique advantages in the search for extraterrestrial life, including the fact that they are resilient to proce...
Recent years showed a gradual transition from terrestrial to aerial survey thanks to the development of UAV and sensors for it. Many sectors benefited by this change among which geological one; drones are flexible, cost-efficient and can support outcrops surveying in many difficult situations such as inaccessible steep and high rock faces. The expe...
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-9051.html
Species of burrowing animals have changed substantially over evolutionary time scales, but, surprisingly, burrows display persisting morphological patterns throughout the Phanerozoic. Deep-sea burrows are geometrically patterned, whereas shallow-marine burrows display simpler morphologies. This divergence between burrow associations is one of the c...
This contribution reports on the field mapping of 9 exceptionally well-exposed channel-levée complexes from Taza-Guercif Basin (NE Morocco), belonging to the Late Miocene Tachrift turbidite system. Separated from each another by hemipelagic marlstones, the mapped channel-levée complexes exhibit thicknesses in the range of 5-25 m. Four main sediment...
This paper investigates the magnetostratigraphy of the ~750 m-thick Costa Grande Member (lower Miocene) from the Castagnola Basin of NW Italy, which represents the turbidite fill of a structurally confined basin where flow ponding resulted in a complete record of deposition from diverse sediment gravity flow types. The magnetostratigraphic profile...
The partitioning of different grain size classes in gravity flow deposits is one of the key characteristics used to infer depositional processes. Turbidites have relatively clean sandstones with most of their clay deposited as part of a mudstone cap or as a distal mudstone layer, whereas sand-bearing debrites commonly comprise mixtures of sand grai...
New images from Mars rover Curiosity display millimetric, elongate stick- like structures in the fluvio-lacustrine deposits of Vera Rubin Ridge, the depositional environment of which has been previously acknowledged as habitable. Morphology, size and topology of the structures are yet incompletely known and their biogenicity remains untested. Here...
The behaviour of the iconic ichnogenus Chondrites is re-evaluated based on review of existing literature and analysis of novel data (macroscopic, thin section and ESEM-EDX observations; CT-scans and resin peels of modern analogues; computer-controlled serial grinding; morphometric analysis and theoretical morphology). The bedding plane expression o...
Lower Permian continental deposits of the fault-controlled Orobic Basin (Central Southern Alps; Northern Italy) include alluvial fan facies interfingering with muddy basin-floor deposits, consisting of three facies associations: heterolithic fine-grained siliciclastic facies, laminated sandstone facies, and oncoidal limestone facies. Besides oncoid...
This study documents the main depositional elements of a dynamically-controlled sand-rich deep-water turbidite system (Upper Cretaceous-Palaeocene Gottero system, northwest Italy). The large exposures and the wide range of facies and deep-water sub-environments recognised, ranging from proximal channels, unconfined proximal and distal lobes and con...
Well-preserved SSE-dipping low-angle normal faults (LANF) active during the Early Permian (Cisuralian) were recognized along the northern margin of the Orobic Basin (central Southern Alps, N Italy). These faults, which escaped most of the Alpine deformations, exhumed the Variscan basement during the deposition of the upper part of the Lower Permian...
Diagenesis is a key controlling factor on sandstone porosity and permeability. Understanding type, paragenetic sequence and spatial patterns of cements is thus important for assessing sandstone hydrocarbon reservoir properties. In this study Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry is used to evaluate the shape and spatial distribution of calci...
The Arda and Stirone marine successions (Italy) represent key sections for the early Pleistocene; they were deposited continuously within a frame of climate change, recording the Calabrian cooling as testified by the occurrence of the “northern guests,” such as the bivalve Arctica islandica . In addition, although the first occurrence of A. islandi...
A brief outline of volcanic-volcaniclastic facies constituting the Cabianca Volcanite (Lower Permian) and a new insight, concerning the volcanites petrology, deriving from the clasts petrography of the Pizzo del Diavolo Fm. (Lower Permian, Central Southern Alps, N Italy).
A brief outline of the continental clastic facies constituting the Pizzo del Diavolo Formation (Lower Permian), the stratigraphic architecture of the Orobic Basin (Central Southern Alps, N Italy) and the depositional setting.
A large borehole lithology dataset from the shallowly buried alluvial aquifer of the Brenta River Megafan (NE Italy) is used in this paper to model hydrofacies with three classical geostatistical methods, namely the Object-Based Simulation (OBS), the Sequential Indicator Simulation (SIS), and the Truncated Gaussian Simulation (TGS), and rank altern...
The Arda River marine succession (Italy) is an excellent site to apply an integrated approach to paleoenvironmental reconstructions, combining the results of sedimentology, body fossil paleontology, and ichnology to unravel the sedimentary evolution of a complex marine setting in the frame of early Pleistocene climate change and tectonic activity....
This study documents the character and occurrence of hybrid event beds deposited across a range of deep-water sub-environments in the Cretaceous-Palaeocene Gottero system, north-west Italy. Detailed fieldwork (>5200 m of sedimentary logs) has shown that hybrid event beds are most abundant in the distal confined basin plain domain (>31% of total thi...
Vertebrate tracks are linked to the depositional environment where they were formed. Several studies
hypothesized a paleoenvironmental control on vertebrate track ichnocoenoses, although this issue was never analyzed thoroughly. A new study of the sedimentology and tetrapod ichnology of two key stratigraphic sections in the Pizzo del Diavolo Format...
Organism-substrate interactions and their products – biogenic structures – are important biosignatures on Earth. This study discusses the application of ichnology – the study of organism-substrate interactions – to the search for present and past life beyond Earth. Three main questions are addressed: (1) Why to look for biogenic structures (i.e. tr...
We investigated the magnetostratigraphy of the Arda River section (northern Italy) where the transition from marine to continental sedimentation occurring in the Po River basin during the Pleistocene is registered. Four magnetic polarity reversals were used to construct an age model of sedimentation aided by marine biostratigraphy and tied to a sta...
The outer parts of deep-water fans, and the basin plains into which they pass, are often described as areas where erosion is negligible and turbidite systems have net aggradation. Nevertheless, sedimentological and stratigraphic analysis of outer-fan-lobe and confined-basin-plain deposits in Cretaceous-Paleocene Gottero Sandstone (NW Italy) has rev...
Submarine sand-rich slope fans within confined basins have long been recognized as components of deepwater depositional systems and, in some areas, they host important hydrocarbon accumulations. The Bric la Croce-Castelnuovo turbidite system (BCTS) of northern Italy offers an opportunity to study an exposed sand-rich slope fan system, allowing reco...
Continental successions in fault-controlled extensional–transtensional basins store a wide range of clastic deposits from various depositional environments, representing a challenging target for hydrocarbon exploration. Recent advances in field-based facies analysis and genetic interpretation of these sediments show that these successions are chara...
Outcrop analogs are routinely used to constrain models of subsurface fluvial sedimentary architecture built through stochastic modeling or inter-well sandbody correlations. Correlability models are analog-based quantitative templates for guiding the well-to-well correlation of sand-bodies, whereas indicator variograms used as input to reservoir mod...
Outcrop analogs are routinely used to constrain models of subsurface fluvial sedimentary architecture built through stochastic modeling or interwell sand-body correlations. Correlability models are analog-based quantitative templates for guiding the well-to-well correlation of sand bodies, whereas indicator variograms used as input to reservoir mod...
The fine-scale heterogeneity of porous media affects the large-scale transport of solutes and contaminants in groundwater and it can be reproduced by means of several geostatistical simulation tools. However, including the available geological information in these tools is often cumbersome. A hierarchical simulation procedure based on a binary tree...
Traces – burrows, borings, footprints – are important evidences of biological behaviour on Earth, yet they received relatively little attention in the field of astrobiology. This study aims to discuss the application of ichnology (i.e. the study of life activity traces) to the search for past and modern life beyond Earth (i.e. herein called Astroic...
Progress towards improved modelling of porous groundwater reservoirs requires the use of large datasets of sedimentological and hydrogeological information from boreholes. Careful integration and analysis of these data can indeed allow for robust conceptual models, which are imperative for appropriately choose the geostatistical method to be used w...
Submarine mass wasting is recognized as one of the main contributors to the reshaping of seafloors. A number of failure and transport mechanisms, including block and debris slides, slump and debris flow or any combination thereof are reported in the literature, reflecting the degree of disaggregation and the rheology of materials involved. Although...
The variability in turbidite bed thickness from a wellbore along with the (unknown) bed shape are important factors in modelling hydrocarbon reservoirs deposited in deep water. Over the last two decades, a number of paper has shown how parameters of statistical distribution of turbidite bed thickness can be useful for discriminating depositional se...
Many deep-water settings are characterized by complex sea floor topography (e.g. salt-withdrawal mini-basins or structurally confined basins). Turbidity currents traversing such areas are affected by confinement, with associated changes to both flow behaviour and deposits. When some or all of the flow is trapped into a topographic low, partial or f...
The Pramollo Basin (Italy-Austria) is one of the richest body and trace fossil sites of the Alps, and exhibits a well-preserved Permian- Carboniferous fluvio-deltaic to marginalmarine sedimentary succession. Despite the exceptionally abundant and well-preserved ichnological heritage, the trace fossils of the Pramollo Basin are not well studied, par...
Hybrid event beds (HEBs) are a type of deep-water sediment gravity flow deposit that generally comprise a basal clean sandstone overlain by a variety of muddier and less-permeable sandy facies. They are thought to be emplaced by combinations of turbidity currents, transitional flows and debris flows, all as part of the same transport event. To date...
Turbidity currents, and other types of submarine sediment density flow, redistribute more sediment across the surface of the Earth than any other sediment flow process, yet their sediment concentration has never been measured directly in the deep ocean. The deposits of these flows are of societal importance as imperfect records of past earthquakes...
Submarine sediment density flows are one of the volumetrically most important processes for sediment transport across Earth. The sediment concentration of flows that reach the deep ocean has never been measured directly, and understanding these long-runout flows remains a major challenge. The Miocene Marnoso-Arenacea Formation in the Italian Apenni...
A probabilistic method has been devised to assess the geologic realism of subsurface well-to-well correlations that entail the lateral tracing of geologic bodies across well arrays with constant spacing. Models of geo-body correlability (based on the ratio between correlatable and penetrated geo-bodies) are obtained from total probabilities of pene...
In this study we analyze the shape of individual ancient sediment density flow deposits (single beds) in order to understand how submarine flows evolve. In particular, we wish to understand whether deposit shape provide evidence for (or against) deposition from dense near-bed layers characterized by hindered settling. The Miocene Marnoso-Arenacea F...
Decapod crustaceans are among the most efficient ecosystem engineers of the Phanerozoic, but the path that led to their engineering success is poorly known. The Permian–Triassic continental succession of Nurra (early Cisuralian–early Middle Triassic; Sardinia, Italy) sheds light on this obscure subject, because it preserves the oldest (Roadian) flu...