Architecture and genesis of prograding deep boundstone margins and debris-dominated carbonate slopes: Examples from the Permian Capitan Formation, Southern Guadalupe Mountains, West Texas

These Capitan foreslope architectures indicate that sustained, small-scale gravitational failure of the upper slope boundstones was the dominant resedimentation process that contributed to slope development. Single collapse events that produced individual breccia beds occurred at a much greater frequency than relative sea level fluctuations recorded on the platform-top, and variability in breccia matrix sediment suggests that boundstones were shedding material downslope throughout all stages of the accommodation cycle. We propose that boundstone accretion, local instability and failure, and resulting slope breccia deposition were somewhat independent of allocyclic, high-frequency accommodation changes, and that an autogenic control associated with deep oligophotic microbial margins is dominant during the development and progradation of steep, debris-dominated slope systems.