Regional Distribution of Submarine Cements Within an Epicontinental Reef System: Central Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Abstract

Since their rediscovery nearly 20 years ago (Ginsburg et al. 1967, Macintyre et al. 1968), submarine cements have been widely reported in a variety of reefs throughout the world. This has led to the recognition that submarine cementation was an important process in many ancient reefs (e.g., Davies 1977, Lohman and Meyers 1977, James and Kobluk 1978, Mazzullo and Cys 1979, Walls et al. 1979, Mazzullo 1980, Playford 1980). The variety of synsedimentary cements reported from these older deposits have textures and fabrics similar to modern submarine cements, e.g., the comparison between former aragonite botryoid cements in Permian phylloid algal mounds (Mazzullo and Cys 1979) and modern submarine botryoidal aragonite in Holocene reef limestones (Ginsburg and James 1976). However, it is also apparent that other modern and ancient reefs do not show evidence of submarine cementation or that certain parts of a given reef are relatively uncemented compared to others (e.g., James et al. 1976; Playford 1980; Marshall 1983 a).