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- Title
Sedimentology and Diagenesis of the Paleocene Salt Mountain Limestone, Southwestern Alabama.
- Authors
KOPASKA-MERKEL, DAVID C.; HAYWICK, DOUGLAS W.; ROOT, ELIZABETH A.; MONTGOMERY, MELISSA M.
- Abstract
The Paleocene Salt Mountain Limestone is a predominantly muddy, subsurface stratigraphic unit in southern Alabama, but is known to contain important reefal buildups, particularly beneath southwestern Alabama. Very limited surface exposure occurs in one isolated location in southwestern Alabama along the up-thrown side of a normal fault associated with an underlying salt dome (Jurassic Louann Salt). Outcrop on either side of Clarke County Road 15 mostly consists of light-colored fossiliferous floatstone and bindstone interbedded with packstone and wackestone. Fossil content is diverse. In situ corals up to 1 meter in diameter have previously been identified and solitary sponges and sponge networks many centimeters across are common; however, precise identification of much of the biota is difficult due in part to diagenetic overprinting. Field work and thin-section petrography distinguished three overlapping, mud-dominated lithofacies; 1) skeletal wackestone-packstone; 2) skeletal packstone-floatstone; and 3) bindstone. Salt Mountain Limestone was deposited on a tropical to subtropical shallow marine shelf east of a major deltaic complex in the Mississippi Interior Salt Basin. The amount of cementation and porosity in the Salt Mountain outcrop is variable. Some parts of the exposure are friable and recessive due to limited cementation or extensive secondary dissolution. Other parts of the exposure are well indurated, resulting in laterally discontinuous bluffs. Diagenetic alteration was dominated by marine micrite cementation, aragonite dissolution, and drusy non-ferroan to weakly ferroan calcite void-filling cementation.
- Subjects
LIMESTONE; PALEOCENE Epoch; JURASSIC stratigraphic geology; NATURAL history; BIOTIC communities; HISTORY
- Publication
Bulletin of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, 2013, Vol 31, Issue 2, p94
- ISSN
0196-1039
- Publication type
Article