The Montalbano Jonico Section (Southern Italy): A Candidate for the GSSP of the Ionian Stage (Lower–Middle Pleistocene Boundary)

The Lower–Middle Pleistocene Subseries boundary and the Ionian Stage still lack formal ratification. The use of the name ‘‘Ionian’’ as a stage of the Middle Pleistocene follows Cita et al. (2006, 2008) and Gibbard et al. (2009). The GSSP of the Ionian Stage should be defined at a point close to the Matuyama–Brunhes (M–B) reversal, in a marine section exposed on land. However, magnetic reversal is considered as only one of multiple criteria that may be used for the definition of a GSSP (Head et al. 2008). The Montalbano Jonico section (Southern Italy) is a continuous marly–clayey marine succession, well exposed and astronomically calibrated, which extends from 1.24 to 0.645 Ma (Ciaranfi et al. 2009). It spans the interval from Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 37 to 17/16 and covers, together with the Vrica section, the sedimentary record of the entire Calabrian Stage ...