Discussion Deep-water massive sands facies, processes and….pdf

ELSEVIER Sedimentary Geology 127 (1999) 111–118 Discussion Deep-water massive sands: facies, processes and channel geometry in the Numidian Flysch, Sicily — comment Olivier Parize a, , Bemard Beaudoin a , Ge´rard Frie`s b a ´ Ecole Nationale Supe´rieure des Mines de Paris, CGES–Se´dimentologie, 35 rue Saint-Honore´, 77300 Fontainebleau,France b Elf-Aquitaine, Tour Elf, 92078 Paris–la De´fense, France Received 12 June 1998; accepted 25 January 1999 For the last 15 years, sedimentologists have been reference lists in Hoyez, 1989 and Geiss, 1992, etc.): trying to find outcrop analogues for subsurface deep- Parize (1988), Parize and Beaudoin (1986a,b); Parize water massive sands. The recent paper by Johansson and Beaudoin (1988) reported that sandy dykes and et al. (1998) in Sedimentary Geology appears to be sills in the Numidian are connected to channelized very stimulating: it deals with massive sandstones massive sands and genetically associated with depo- of the Sicilian Numidian Flysch, part of a formation sition of high-density flows. which crops out throughout the southern border of the Western Mediterranean Sea (cf. fig. 1 of Johans- son et al., 1998, taken from Hoyez, 1989). 1. The analysis of the turbiditic systems However, we feel that the conclusions of the paper are based on incomplete field observations and seem The analysis of turbiditic systems is generally to show that the authors remain unaware of recent