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Late Permian to Holocene Paleofacies Evolution of the Arabian Plate and its Hydrocarbon Occurrences
By
Martin A. Ziegler1
Search and Discovery Article #30009 (2002)
*Adapted for online presentation from article with the same title by the same authors published in GeoArabia, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2001, Gulf PetroLink, Bahrain (www.gulfpetrolink.com.bh). Appreciation is extended to the author and to Moujahed Al-Husseini, Gulf Petrolink, Editor-in-Chief of GeoArabia (geoarabi@batelco.com.bh) for permission to present this article online.
1Consultant, Binningen, Switzerland (mrziegler@bluewin.ch).
A series of 19 paleofacies maps have been generated for given time intervals between the Late Permian and Holocene to reconstruct the depositional history of the Arabian Plate. The succession of changing lithological sequences is controlled by the interplay of eustacy and sediment supply with regional and local tectonic influences. The Mesozoic paleofacies history of the Plate is, in its central and eastern portion east of Riyadh, strongly influenced by an older N-trending, horst and graben system that reflects the grain of the Precambrian Amar Collision and successively younger structural deformations. The late Paleozoic Hercynian orogenic event caused block faulting and relative uplift and resulted in a marked paleorelief. This jointed structural pattern dominated the entire Mesozoic and, to some extent, the Cenozoic facies distribution. The relationship between producing fields and the paleofacies maps illustrates the various petroleum systems of particular times and regions.
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