--> ABSTRACT: Facies Architecture and Stratigraphy of a Deltaic-Detached Turbidite System in the Eocene of Svalbard (Norwegian Artic), by D. Mellere, E. Granbero, S. Johansen, and T. Olsen; #91021 (2010)

Datapages, Inc.Print this page

Facies Architecture and Stratigraphy of a Deltaic-Detached Turbidite System in the Eocene of Svalbard (Norwegian Artic)

MELLERE, D., E. GRANBERO, S. JOHANSEN,  and T. OLSEN


The Eocene Battfjellet Formation in Central Spitsbergen consists of a series of steeply dipping deltaic clinoforms which prograde into basinal shales. One of these apparently uniform sandy clinoforms has been mapped in detail, walking-out facies relationships and bounding surfaces. The tongue is up to 60 m thick, and crops out in a 6 km long, continuous dip-oriented exposure in Van Keulenfjord. The tongue shows a complex four-tiered internal architecture with superimposed, deltaic and turbidite sandbodies. In its landward reaches, the lower part of the tongue consists of a 50 m thick, coarsening-upward mouth bar complexes and fluvial distributary channels of highstand origin which rapidly pro grade onto the slope and thin basinwards into prodelta turbidites. A surface of erosion and by-pass separates this first unit from some 20 m thick, lowstand sandy turbidite wedge which develops at the base of slope into the basin floor. The wedge consists of heterolithic slumped deposits sharply overlain by sandy channel-levees and lobate sheets of high-density turbidites. After an initial stage of progradation, the turbidite system retrogrades, onlapping the slope and developing a 13 m thick shale-prone wedge of heterolithic channel/levees which pinch out at the shelf break. The upper part of the tongue shows the progradation and then the retrogradation of another river-dominated deltaic system which downlaps the slope turbidite wedge. The sandy and the heterolithic turbidite wedges (both detached from the underlying delta system) and the overlying delta are believed to have been deposited all during lowstand and, limitatively to the uppermost deltaic complex, during the initial stage of transgression. The tongue is marked at its top by a maximum flooding surface and by the downlap of the overlying deltaic shaley clinoforms.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91021©1997 AAPG Annual Convention, Dallas, Texas.