Lithofacies architecture and depositional environment of Late Cretaceous Lameta Formation, central India
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Lithofacies architecture and depositional environment of Late Cretaceous Lameta Formation, central India Ashok K. Srivastava & Rupesh S. Mankar
Received: 16 March 2013 / Accepted: 13 November 2013 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2013
Abstract Establishment of lithofacies and interpretation of depositional environment of the Lameta Formation have been carried out for a new area having three nearby exposures. Overall, the successions are broadly differentiable into three major units, i.e. arenaceous in the lower part, argillaceous in middle and calcareous at the top, which more or less serve as three lithofacies associations. Each association consists of various lithofacies which are identified and established on the basis of field observations, added with significant petrological details. The arenaceous association includes five lithofacies, viz. massive sandstone lithofacies; green sandstone lithofacies; thinly bedded, yellowish orange and greyish brown sandstone lithofacies; coarse-grained sandstone lithofacies and dark brown bioturbated sandstone lithofacies. The argillaceous lithofacies association consists of yellowishbrownish-greenish clay–siltstone lithofacies and light grey silty–clay with concretions lithofacies, whereas the calcareous lithofacies association is represented by calcrete lithofacies, nodular limestone lithofacies, chertified limestone lithofacies and intraformational breccia lithofacies. The facies analysis reveals that the deposition of Late Cretaceous Lameta sediments took place in fluvial–lacustrine environments in semi arid condition.
Keywords Late Cretaceous . Lameta . Lithofacies . Fluvial– lacustrine environments . Central India
A. K. Srivastava (*) : R. S. Mankar P. G. Department of Geology, SGB Amravati University, Amravati 444602, India e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction The Lameta Formation of Late Cretaceous age covers about 5,000 km2 area in the central and western parts of India, distributed largely at Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh; Nagpur and Chandrapur districts of Maharashtra and Anjar and Kheda districts of Gujarat. This stratigraphic unit is under investigation from long back for the reconstructions of depositional environment and palaeobiological condition including dinosaurian remains. These two aspects of the type area succession exposed at Jabalpur remain to be a matter of debate from last five decades, i.e. marine or non-marine environment of deposition and their geographical extent, which still continues. The shallow marine environment has been suggested on the basis of petrology, algal structures, glauconitic beds and lithological architecture (Chanda 1963a, b, 1965, 1967; Singh 1981; Singh and Srivastava 1981; Chanda and Bhattacharya 1966), and lithological architecture and extensive crab burrows including Thalassinoides (Kumar and Tandon 1977, 1978, 1979). Recently, Shukla and Srivastava (2008) and Saha et al. (2010) suggested coastal complex setting which is mainly based on the occurrences of lizard eggs and trace fossils. The second sch
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