Download Sedimentary Basin - Sedimentology - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Geology in PDF only on Docsity!
SEDIMENTARY BASINS
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The official definition of a sedimentary basin is: a low area in the Earth’s crust, of tectonic origin, in which sediments accumulate. Sedimentary basins range in size from as small as hundreds of meters to large parts of ocean basins. The essential element of the concept is tectonic creation of relief , to provide both a source of sediment and a relatively low place for the deposition of that sediment.
1.2 Keep in mind that a sedimentary basin doesn’t have to be a place on the Earth’s surface with strictly basinal shape, with closed contours, like a washbowl: great masses of sediment can be deposited on a surface with a gentle and uniform slope_._ But implicit in the concept of a sedimentary basin is the existence of prolonged crustal subsidence, to make a place for a thick deposit of sediment that might well have been deposited in an area without basinal geometry at the surface. Tectonics is needed to make sedimentary basins, but the record of the basin itself is sedimentary.
1.3 As with most blanket statements, the one above has exceptions to it. A sedimentary basin can be made just by erecting high land in an adjacent area by volcanism.
1.4 The term “sedimentary basin” is usually not applied to relatively thin and very extensive deposits of sandstone, limestone, and shale from epicontinental seas on the cratons, many of which have seen no deformation through billions of years, but only to relatively thick deposits in tectonically active areas with negative relief. (But intracratonic basins are the exception in this regard.)
2. TECTONICS AND SEDIMENTATION
2.1 Tectonics is the most important control on sedimentation ; climate is a rather distant second. The important effects of tectonics on sedimentation, direct or indirect, include the following:
- nature of sediment
- rate of sediment supply
- rate of deposition
- depositional environment
- nature of source rocks
- nature of vertical succession
2.2 In fact, tectonics affects climate itself , by way of effects as broad as the distribution of oceans and continents, and as local as rain shielding by local mountain ranges. And sedimentation itself affects tectonics , although to a much lesser extent, mainly by increasing the lithospheric loading in the basin.
2.3 The other side of the coin is that by far the best way of telling paleotectonics is by the sedimentary record in sedimentary basins. The disposition of sediment types, sediment thicknesses, and paleocurrents in a basin gives evidence of the existence and location of elevated areas of the crust created by tectonism.
3. QUESTIONS ABOUT SEDIMENTARY BASINS
3.1 Here are some important questions you might ask about a given sedi- mentary basin:
- What was the size and shape of the basin, and how did these change as the basin was filled?
- Is (was) the basin floored by continental crust or oceanic crust?
- What were the kinds and proportions of sediments that filled the basin?
- What were the sources of the sediment , and by what pathways was it transported to the depositional sites?
- What was the history of filling of the basin?
- How can the original geometry of the basin be distinguished from subse- quent deformation of the basin?
- What was the overall tectonic setting of the basin?
4. PRACTICAL THINGS ABOUT BASINS
4.1 The only basins that are preserved in their entirety are those that lie entirely in the subsurface! Basins exposed at the surface are undergoing destruc- tion and loss of record by erosion. So there’s an ironic tradeoff between having more complete preservation in the subsurface but less satisfactory observations.
subsidence, and sea-level change. This lets you reconstruct the configuration of the basin through time, perhaps by drawing palinspastic cross sections for various time intervals. In a way, this is the next best thing to having in your possession a time-lapse movie of the entire development of the basin.
4.6 This is a good place to warn you about vertical exaggeration of cross sections of sedimentary basins. Cross sections are almost always drawn with great vertical exaggeration, typically somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1. This is because in true scale most basins are relatively thin accumulations, hundreds to thousands of meters of sediment spread over distances of tens to hundreds of kilometers. So to see the relationships adequately in cross sections, the sections have to have great vertical exaggeration. Carefully constructed sections show both the vertical and the horizontal scale, but cartoons often don’t show the scales.
5. PALEOCURRENTS
5.1 Much effort has gone into developing ways of figuring out paths of dispersal of sedimentary material in basins. One of the standard ways is to mea- sure paleocurrent directions recorded locally in the rocks. (A paleocurrent is just what the term implies: a current, of water or wind, that existed at some time in the past .) Techniques are well established.
5.2 Knowledge of paleocurrents is helpful in solving both local and re- gional problems of sedimentary basins. Locally, paleocurrent directions can help you to figure out or predict, indirectly, the shape and orientation of sediment bodies , like channel sandstones. This has obvious advantages in petroleum explo- ration. Regionally, paleocurrent directions can help establish paleoslope and source of sediment supply to the basin.
5.3 You have already heard about a lot of the features that can be used to establish paleocurrent directions. Here’s a list of the most important, with anno- tations:
Cross-stratification. Measure the local orientation of laminae in the cross sets, on the theory that the local downdip direction, which presumably is the direction of progradation of the foreset slope, is likely to represent fairly closely the local current direction. That’s true, however, only if the bed forms were reasonably two-dimensional. If the bed forms were three- dimensional, resulting in trough cross stratification, measurement of foreset dip directions at local places in the cross sets can be very misleading ; it’s much better to try to ascertain the orientation of the trough fills themselves, although it takes good outcrops to do that. Seeing rib and furrow is by far the most reliable way of obtaining a paleocurrent direction
from cross-stratified deposits, but unfortunately it’s uncommon to see on outcrop.
Bed forms. If you are lucky enough to see bedding planes covered with symmetrical ripples or dunes, you can get an excellent measurement of current direction.
Clast orientation. Long axes of the larger clasts in a clastic deposit, whether gravel or sand, are commonly oriented by the current, although the orientation may be rather subtle. The problem is that the orientation relative to the current (flow-transverse? flow-parallel?) depends on the flow itself in ways not well understood. So beware of clast orientation in and of itself. Pebble imbrication is an exception, and should always be sought in gravels and conglomerates. (But see below under parting lineation.)
Sole marks. Flutes and grooves at the bases of turbidites and other strong- current-event beds give excellent evidence of the direction of the initial, eroding current. But keep in mind that the later current that did the depositing did not necessarily flow in exactly the same direction.
Parting lineation. Parting lineation is thought to reflect a subtle anisotropy in rock strength caused by a statistical tendency toward alignment of sand grains in a sandstone parallel to the current direction. It gives excellent evidence of the orientation of the current, but unfortunately not the direc- tion.
5.4 The paleocurrent measurements you take from dipping beds are no good in themselves: what you need to do is “undeform” the strata by rotating them back to horizontal, taking your paleocurrent measurements with them. That’s straightforward (using a stereonet by hand, or a computer program)provided that the strata are not strongly deformed. But the greater the deformation, the more uncertain is the exact way you should be undeforming the strata.
6. HOW BASINS ARE MADE
6.1 Introduction
6.1.1 In one sense, the origin of sedimentary basins boils down to the question of how relief on the Earth is created. Basically, there are only a few ways, described in the following sections.
6.4.2 But suppose that some erosion took place while the crust was elevated (Figure 11-2). The crust is thinned where the erosion took place (and thickened somewhere else, where there was deposition; that might be far away, at the mouth of some long river system), so when the crust cools again it subsides to a position lower than where it started , thus creating a basin available for filling by sediments.
COLD LITHOSPHERE
COLD LITHOSPHERE
HOT LITHOSPHERE
HEATING, UPLIFT
COOLING, SUBSIDENCE
Ref.
NET EROSION SUBSIDENCE
Figure 11- 2
6.4.3 But the magnitude of crustal lowering by this mechanism is less than is often observed in basins thought to be created thermally (Figure 11-3). It has therefore been proposed, and widely accepted, that in many cases extensional thinning of the lithosphere accompanies the heating. Then, upon recooling, the elevation of the top of the lithosphere is less than before the heating and extension. This kind of subsidence has been invoked to explain many sedimentary basins.
Figure by MIT OCW. (^) Figure 11- 3
6.5 Flexural
6.5.1 Another important way to make basins is to park a large load on some area of the lithosphere (Figure 11-4). The new load causes that lithosphere to subside by isostatic adjustment. But because the lithosphere has considerable flexural rigidity, adjacent lithosphere is bowed down also. The region between the high-standing load and the lithosphere in the far field (in the parlance of geophysics, that just means far away!) is thus depressed to form a basin. This model has been very successful in accounting for the features of foreland basins ,
Figure by MIT OCW
COLD LITHOSPHERE
COLD LITHOSPHERE
HOT, THINNED LITHOSPHERE
HEATING, UPLIFT, EXTENSION
COOLING, SUBSIDENCE
Ref.
NET SUBSIDENCE
