Outline of geology

The Boso Peninsula is situated in the southern part of the Kanto region in central Honshu, between two major tectonic provinces of the Japanese Islands: northeastern Honshu, extending to the north, and southwestern Honshu, extending to the west. Thick marine sediments accumulated in a depositional basin that appeared in the middle Pliocene in the southern part of the Kant region; this Plio–Pleistocene section is well exposed in the Boso Peninsula.

The Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits in the Boso Peninsula consist of the Mineoka, Hota, Miura, Kazusa, and Shimosa groups, in stratigraphic order, together with younger terrace formations and volcanic-ash layers. Each of the groups is unconformable with the others. Planktonic foraminifera indicate that the Miocene–Pliocene transition is in the uppermost part of the Amatsu Formation.

After deposition of the Anno Formation of the uppermost Miura Group, the area was uplifted, and a new basin, in which the Kazusa Group was deposited, appeared to the north of the emerged area. In the central-to-eastern parts of the peninsula, the Kazusa Group comprises the Kurotaki, Katsuura, Namihana, Ohara, Kiwada, Otadai, Umegase, Kokumoto, Kakinokidai, Chonan, Mandano, and Kasamori formations, in ascending order. Those formations consist of sandstone and siltstone, with pyroclastic intercalations, and the classification of the formations is based on the predominant lithology in the interbedded rocks.

The pyroclastic intercalations of the Kazusa Group have been carefully traced in the Boso, Choshi, and Miura peninsulas, where they are used as key beds. Lateral changes in lithology and local stratigraphy have been well established (Mitsunashi and Yazaki, 1958, 1961; Mitsunashi et al., 1959, 1961, 1976a,b, 1979; Yazaki and Mitsunashi, 1962; Mitsunashi and Yazaki, 1968; Ishiwada et al., 1971).

Introduction

During the XI INQUA Congress in Moscow in 1982, the INQUA Subcommission 1-d, “Pliocene–Pleistocene Boundary,” and the working group of IGCP Project 41, “Neogene/Quaternary Boundary,” jointly proposed that the section at Vrica in Calabria, southern Italy, be adopted as the Pliocene–Pleistocene boundary-stratotype. With the acceptance of that proposal by the IUGS International Commission on Stratigraphy (Nikiforova and Alekseev, Chapter 1, this volume), the type horizon designated at Vrica has been extended to Plio–Pleistocene sections around the world.

On the other side of the globe from Vrica, many marine sedimentary sections that are continuous through the Pliocene–Pleistocene transition are well exposed along the Pacific coast. Among these the Boso Peninsula in central Japan is one of the best places to study the Pliocene–Pleistocene transition (Itihara et al., Chapter 24, this volume). In recent years we have worked to correlate the Plio–Pleistocene sections of Calabria with those of the Boso Peninsula on the basis of geomagnetic reversals and planktonic microfossil events. We began our study of the Vrica section in 1976, shortly after the initial reports from the Italian team led by Raimondo Selli (1975; Selli et al., 1977). In 1977, in meetings at Birmingham, England, and at Dushanbe, Tadjikistan, USSR, we responded to the urgent request of the IGCP-41 working group and reported on a preliminary study of the paleomagnetic polarity sequence of the Vrica section, although the sampling interval had been inadequate to satisfactorily resolve the magnetostratigraphy (Nakagawa et al., 1980).