Physical Criteria for Recognition of Lacustrine Gravel Beach-bar Deposits using Modern Examples, the Qinghai Lake, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China

Abstract

Beach-bar deposits are very common in the shallow-water zone of lacustrine basins, and have been an attractive exploration target within lacustrine basins, where numerous lacustrine beachbar oil pools have been discovered recently. Physical criteria for recognizing lacustrine beach-bar deposits are important not only for reconstruction of paleoenvironments and paleoshorelines, but also for the exploration and development of hydrocarbon. Modern beach-bars, 162 km in length, in Qinghai Lake, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, were studied in detail based on lithology, sedimentary structure, texture, basal contact, bed thickness and dip angle, mean grain size, sorting, skewness, sedimentary succession, etc. The study found that the gravel beach-bars have a fixed sedimentary succession, “ABC” sequence, which is composed of A, B, and C intervals. The A interval is characterized by poorly sorted pebbly sandstones, the B interval is characterized by well sorted conglomerates and the C interval is characterized by normally graded sandstones. The A, B, and C intervals have particular quantitative characteristics, including mean grain size, sorting, skewness, dip angle of layers, and thickness of layers. The gravel beach-bar deposits can be presented in different combined pattern, such as “ABCABC”, “ABABAB”, and “BCBCBC”. The beach-bars deposits are stripe-like, parallel to the shoreline, and with convex tops and flat bottoms. The length of the beach-bars can be tens of kilometers. The width of the beach-bars can be thousands of meters.