Field Trip: Syn-Rift Carbonate Platforms; Miocene-Recent Gulf of Suez

This 6-day field and classroom based course investigates the complex facies relationships found in rift basin carbonate platforms and provides insights into syn-sedimentary structural influences and changing depositional environments with rift basin evolution.

Based on the shores of the southern Gulf of Suez this course starts with a review and update on the processes of carbonate sedimentation using the natural laboratory of the nearby modern, shallow marine environments. Tectonostratigraphic models for carbonates are then investigated with a focus on rift basin environments. Concepts are reinforced and demonstrated in the field on world-class exposures of a exhumed Miocene carbonate platform. This enables potential reservoir facies to be studied in different structural settings (footwall, transfer zone etc.) and the change from marine to non-marine carbonate factories to be correlated with rift basin evolution. Final review lectures examine evaporitic to marine to lacustrine rift basin carbonates from Mesozoic and Cenozoic basins (SW and NE Atlantic, SE Asia and Red Sea-Gulf of Aden).

• Agenda
• Audience
• Prerequisites

• Agenda

  • Lectures and classroom exercises: Introduction to processes of carbonate accumulation, carbonate factories and depositional environments. Florida case study

  • Modern carbonate grains and textural classification of carbonates; the building blocks for limestone formation

  • Carbonate facies and facies models.

  • Field Study: Carbonate grain types and early lithification in subtropical lagoon, beach, fringing reef and wadi environments, clastic-carbonate interactions in shallow marine setting. Sharm El Naga, NW Red Sea

  • Evening classroom: Gulf of Suez - Red Sea rift basin geological evolution

  • Lectures and Classroom Exercises

  • Principles of carbonate sequence stratigraphy. Outcrop and seismic sequence stratigraphy of carbonates,

  • Tectonic classification of carbonate platforms.

  • Field study of a Miocene fault-block carbonate platform on the Gulf of Suez rift margin. Stratigraphic and structural settings, footwall to hangingwall facies associations, sequences and potential reservoir facies.

  • Evening exercise: Interwell correlations in fault-block platform setting.

  • Field study of stratigraphic architecture and carbonate facies associations in a transfer zone setting. Changing carbonate factories with rift basin isolation

  • Exercise on stratigraphic logging and facies correlation

  • Lectures and classroom exercises on rift basin carbonates; structural settings of platforms in marine to lacustrine and evaporitic basins. Non-marine-lacustrine carbonates in rift basin settings; facies and facies models.

  • Exercises on interpretation of marine and lacustrine carbonate reservoir rocks

• Audience

  Petroleum geologists, general geologists, sedimentologists, reservoir modellers, reservoir engineers, petrophysicists.

• Prerequisites

  Basic knowledge of Geology