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Evolution of a young salt giant: The example of the Messinian evaporites in the Levantine Basin
Published in Manfred Wallner, Karl-Heinz Lux, Wolfgang Minkley, H. Reginald Hardy, The Mechanical Behavior of Salt – Understanding of THMC Processes in Salt, 2017
Owing to its special rheology, salt is capable of decoupling deep rooted tectonics from the supra-salt response. Salt tectonics controls the formation of complex traps for hydrocarbon or metals. Lateral salt flow may cause subaerial or submarine land slides. Salt diapirs are potential waste repositories. The interaction of fluids and salt may cause subrosion and subsequent surface collapses with a potential impact on civil infrastructures. Owing to their impermeability evaporites control fluid dynamics and hydrocarbon distribution. The thorough understanding and prediction of salt tectonics and fluid dynamics is therefore fundamental in frontier research and it is crucial to develop ways to optimise exploitation and risk assessment. However, in spite of their general importance within the earth system there is a significant lack of knowledge about the early evolution of juvenile salt giants and their controlling factors.
Depth creep of slopes and long-term landslide development
Published in R. N. Chowdhury, Geomechanics and Water Engineering in Environmental Management, 2017
Creep is a wide-spread natural phenomenon encountered in a great variety of scientific and technical problems. The geological aspect of this process includes such questions as folding tectonics, glacier motion, outcrop curvature, salt tectonics, surface creep of waste on slopes, landslides, earthflows, etc. Creep of rocks on slopes reveals in diverse ways depending on the rheological properties of rocks, on acting stresses and on time.
Salt Insertions in Sedimentary Sequences: Impacts on Sediment Distortion and Sediment Fracturing
Published in Ian Lerche Ph.D., Kenneth Petersen, Salt and Sediment Dynamics, 2017
We present illustrations derived from numerical results for the initiation of faulting in formations overlying and underlying a rapidly moving salt sheet. These results may be applied to rift or extensional basins characterized by salt deposition and subsequent salt tectonics.
Depositional environments and sequence stratigraphy of the Arab Formation, Persian Gulf, Offshore Iran
Published in Petroleum Science and Technology, 2022
Mehdi Sarfi, Ali Asaadi, Ali Imandoust, Amin Navidtalab
The Arabian Plate is surrounded by the rifting margin of the Red Sea in the southwest, the Dead Sea in the northwest, the passive margin of the Indian Ocean in the southeast and the crushed zone of Zagros-Taurus in the northeast (Sharland et al. 2004) (Figure 1a). The Persian Gulf on the northeastern margin of the Arabian Plate is considered as one of the most important hydrocarbon basins in the world, and is divided into the northwestern and southeastern depressions by the Qatar-Fars structural high with NE–SW trend (Farzadi 2006; Konyuhov and Maleki 2006). Hormuz salts and their related movements have played an important role in the deformation and formation of hydrocarbon-bearing structures, especially in the southeastern part of this area. In this part, similar to most of the structures on the Arabian Plate, the fields are structurally shaped and oriented by the basement faults and salt tectonics, and generally characterized by simple and gentle folds. The study field is located in the southeast of the Persian Gulf (near the Qatar-Fars arch) and shows an approximate NW–SE trend (Figure 1b).
Paleosols and weathering leading up to Snowball Earth in central Australia
Published in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2021
Parent materials to paleosols of the Johnnys Creek Formation were largely dolomitic loess (Figures 6 and 7). This parent material has isotopically enriched δ13C values (Figures 3 and 4), uncorrelated with δ18O (Figure 9), so derived from a marine dolostone by eolian or glacial erosion. Its carbonate δ13C values are much higher than that of the underlying Loves Creek Formation but could have been derived from physical erosion of the Gillen Formation of the Bitter Springs Group (Swanson-Hysell et al., 2012). The Gillen Formation includes thick halite units that were deformed by salt tectonics before deposition of the overlying Loves Creek Formation (Lindsay, 1987). Such highly positive δ13C values are widely found in Precambrian red-bed dolomite successions of intracratonic playa lakes, perhaps due to enrichment by evaporation or methanogenic degassing of very light carbon (Melezhik et al., 1999). Clay may also have been included in this eolian parent material because there is little evidence for clay production in the profile from abundance of weatherable minerals or alumina/silica or alumina/bases ratios (Figure 7), as in soils near the arid-hyperarid transition in Chile (Ewing et al., 2006). Loess plains are among the most productive of modern soil parent materials, rich in weatherable minerals and physically stable (Fehrenbacher et al., 1986; Swineford & Frye, 1951).
Geological setting of exceptional geological features of the Flinders Ranges
Published in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2020
The Curdimurka Subgroup has been disrupted and intruded into overlying rocks owing to the gravitational instability and mobility of the originally halite-bearing succession (Figure 6). This salt tectonics (halokinesis) took place throughout the later Adelaidean and Cambrian in both syndepositional and syn-Delamerian settings. In these carbonate-matrix diapiric breccias the evaporite minerals have been replaced by carbonate cement. Syndepositional intrusion, extrusion and in some cases exposure as islands locally influenced structural development and patterns and thicknesses of sedimentation. Salt withdrawal minibasins, salt welds and related features have been widely interpreted throughout the Adelaide Geosyncline (Counts, 2017, and references therein). Where exposed subaerially, the rising diapirs shed coarse debris into lenticular conglomerate interbeds in the adjacent depositing sediments, or resulted in slumping, unconformities and pinch-outs (Dyson, 1996). Salt tectonic structures have been imaged on seismic sections in many petroleum-bearing basins, but outstanding outcrop examples of cross-sections of different orientations, such as in the Flinders Ranges, are very rare (Government of South Australia, 2017; Rowan et al.,2020) and allow detailed research and reinterpretation to better understand analogous petroleum systems (Kernen et al.,2020).