Carboniferous manning canyon formation, northern Utah, USA: A carbonate-mud-dominated CYCLOTHEM motif recording the main onset of the late PALEOZOIC ice age

Abstract A poorly understood Mississippian to basal Pennsylvanian succession is preserved in parts of northern Utah, western USA. The mudrock- and carbonate-dominated Manning Canyon Formation and lateral equivalents have been referred to as “cyclothems” and might therefore be expected to preserve a record of repeated, late Paleozoic sea-level excursions similar to cyclothemic successions elsewhere in the paleotropics. In this paper, we document the sedimentology and stratigraphy of the Serpukhovian to earliest Bashkirian Manning Canyon Formation, focusing on surface exposures in the Oquirrh and Uinta Mountains and a cored subsurface intersection from central Utah. Four facies associations were identified in the Manning Canyon Formation: Mid-Shelf, Muddy Inner Shelf, Deltaic, and Coastal Plain, which are herein interpreted in the context of a muddy, semi-enclosed, epicontinental carbonate shelf fringed by a low-relief coastal plain. These facies associations are broadly comparable to recent and extant environments from a range of equatorial, clay-rich, deltaic, coastal plain, and offshore carbonate-producing environments in the Caribbean Sea, northern Australia, and SE Asia, which can be used as first-order analogues for the Manning Canyon Formation. These modern analogues suggest that several relative sea-level excursions of