Latest Triassic and Early Jurassic extension of continental crust capped by a shallow water carbonate platform in the Southern Alps (northern Italy) resulted in the episodic creation of an array of half-grabens with west-tilted floors, each bounded by an east-dipping master normal fault. Faulting, platform drowning, and basin formation progressed stepwise from west to east over a period of about 20 million years. The foundering of each successive half-graben resulted in formation of a sequence-bounding unconformity over the remainder of the surviving platform. Each half-graben consists of a western thickly sedimented, deep-water basinal part and an eastern more thinly sedimented ramp or plateau part. A west-dipping antithetic fault commonly divides the two parts.

The consistent polarity of the tilted blocks suggests they may be the shallow, brittle-crust expression of lithospheric extension along an east-dipping simple shear.

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