Late Permian to Mid-Cretaceous Carbonate Platform Along the Passive Margin of the Southeastern Mediterranean

B. Derin, Z. Garfunkel

Starting from the Late Permian and throughout most of the Mesozoic, up to 5 km of shallow-water carbonates formed in a subsiding belt along the northern fringe of the Arabo-African continent, passing inland into thinner and clastic-rich sections. This sedimentation pattern was established in the Late Permian and evolved in several distinct stages that depended on global oscillations of sea level and local tectonic events. In Middle Triassic to early Liassic times, several pulses of faulting and magmatism, interpreted as rifting, occurred along the subsiding belt of carbonate deposition and produced a passive continental margin. Tectonic activity ended by the Roarcian, and since then a rather uniform shallow-water carbonate shelf formed. It was delimited by shoals of high- nergy sediments and fringing reefs, inland of which low-energy carbonate muds and sometimes dolomite accumulated. By the Late Jurassic a more than 1.5 km-high continental slope developed, separating the shallow-water domain from a starved deep-water basin. In latest Jurassic and earliest Cretaceous time the activity of an intraplate hot spot caused extensive magmatism, uplifting, and erosion. The eroded material formed a thick sediment body in front of the continental slope. Since late Valanginian time, renewed regional subsidence and a rise in sea level led to a new phase of carbonate deposition over a wide shallow-water shelf. This was fringed by an accentuated continental slope covered by a basinward-thinning wedge-shaped apron of calciclastic sediments. This region was terminated by enonian and later deformation related to plate collision in the Alpine orogenic belt.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91032©1988 Mediterranean Basins Conference and Exhibition, Nice, France, 25-28 September 1988.