A playa deposit of pre-Yellow Sands age (upper Rotliegend/Weissliegend) in the Permian of northeast England

Abstract

A complexly interbedded thin succession of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone beneath the Permian Yellow Sands Formation (upper Rotliegend/Weissliegend) was cored in a borehole 11 km off the coast of northeast England. The cored strata rest unconformably on fissured Westphalian B mudstone and mainly comprise low-dipping fine- to coarse-grained grey sandstone with unevenly spaced thinner dark-red to grey mudstone beds and laminae. Most of the sandstone beds are moderately to poorly sorted, fine- to very fine-grained subarkoses, with some sublitharenites, and are weakly to strongly cemented by dolomite (predominant), kaolinite and illite; sedimentary structures include subhorizontal plane to wavy lamination, ripple lamination, salt ridges and soft-sediment deformation. The siltstones and mudstones are more uniform in lithology and primary thickness; they contain sandstone-filled desiccation cracks, mudstone saucers and narrow sandstone dykes. Traces of possible former evaporite minerals are concentrated in the sandstones. By comparison with modem desert depositional environments, these strata are interpreted as the deposits of a playa occupying a depression on a stony, deflationary desert surface on a rock pediment or peneplain flanking the ancestral Pennines. The floor of the depression, which probably lay in the capillary fringe just above the contemporary water table, was periodically flooded so as to form a shallow playa lake. Comparable successions beneath the Yellow Sands have not been recorded from surface exposures in northeast England but mudstone beds at this stratigraphical level have been recorded in four other cored offshore boreholes and are presumed to be of similar origin to those described in this study. The stratigraphical position of these deposits suggests that they may be of pre-Yellow Sands age and coeval with or younger than the Basal Permian Breccia. Palynological analysis of mudstone samples from the core reveal the presence of plant material and indeterminate, pyrite-invested, possibly indigenous bisaccate pollen indicative of a vegetated hinterland with deposition occurring within a reducing, possibly sulphide-rich environment.