This is the Home Page of a paper published in the Volume 7 of the Marine and Petroleum Geology in 1990 (pp. 334-370, November).
If you click on the interlinks (underlined text and bots), you can navigate and you will find the text and the plates of this paper.
As illustrated on this tentative geological interpretation of a regional composite seismic line of the Gulf of Mexico, the deep offshore corresponds to the superposition of two sedimentary basins. Following the classification of Bally and Snelson, the lower basin is a Mesozoic Mediterranean-type Basin and the upper one a Cenozoic Divergent Margin. The Mesozoic Mediterranean-type Basin implies an oceanisation, which is clear recognized on this tentative. Indeed, the oceanic crust, in the central part of the tentative is, mainly, represented by sheeted dykes, with associated subaerial lava flows (SDRs, i.e. Seaward Dipping Reflectors), in the beginning of the oceanisation, that is to say, before the subaerial spreading centers be completed immersed into the sea. In the Mesozoic Mediterranean basin the Jurassic salt (in red on the tentative) induced an important salt tectonics, which created different types of extensional traps (mainly morphological traps by juxtaposition). In the Cenozoic Divergent Margin, three major unconformities (30 Ma ; 17.5 Ma and 5.5 Ma) divide the stratigraphic column into three major continental encroachment stratigraphic subcycles. It is interesting to notice, at the bottom of the sea, the bathymetric anomaly induced by the distal part of the Mississippi fan.
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Allochthonous Salt, Structure and Stratigraphy
of the North-Eastern Gulf of Mexico
by
Shengyu Wu, A. Bally and Carlos Cramez
(Department of Geology and Geophysics, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX)
Send E-mails to carloscramez@gmail.com or to carlos.cramez@bluewin.ch with questions or comments about these paper.
Copyright © 1989 Shengyu Wu, A. Bally & Carlos Cramez
Last updated: August, 2014