Late Ordovician glacial record of the Anti-Atlas, Morocco

Abstract

Late Ordovician glaciogenic deposits are exposed intermittently along an 800 km long outcrop belt in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southern Morocco. These deposits are of economic significance as potential oil-bearing sandstones in the Tindouf and Boudenib basins and thus are here re-examined as analogues to subsurface hydrocarbon reservoirs. Glaciogenic deposits of the Upper Second Bani Formation rest unconformably upon underlying shallow marine clastic deposits. The unconformity is characterised by a series of palaeovalleys, some 0.5–1.0 km wide, and up to 100 m deep, which may have been cut under elevated hydrostatic pressures as tunnel valleys beneath a Late Ordovician ice sheet. The valleys and intervalley areas are filled with glaciogene sediments categorized into five facies associations, namely 1) a tabular sandstone association (shallow marine/shoreface deposits), 2) a massive sandstone and conglomerate (ice contact debrites), 3) meandriform sandstone deposits (ice proximal sandur), 4) stratified diamictites (ice-rafted debris) and 5) sigmoidally bedded sandstones (intertidal sandstones). Deformation in these sediments is ubiquitous and includes soft-sediment striated pavements, metre-scale duplex systems, thrust and fold belts of deformation affecting some tens of metres of sediment, and pervasive lineations. These features are interpreted to record the complex nature of deformation processes operating beneath a Late Ordovician ice sheet including sliding at the ice-bed interface, folding and deformation within the sediment column, and a series of complex ramps, detachments and shear zones within an unconsolidated pile of sediment beneath the ice sheet.