Cores Abu Dhabi - SEPM Strata

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Pre Development Abu Dhabi Sabkha Cores Photos and Images

These are maps, diagrams and photographs relate to the push-cores collected by Godfrey Butler during his PhD studies of the Abu Dhabi (UAE) coastal sabkhas. These cores penetrated sabkha flats that no longer exist, having been replaced by the current industrial development that now occupies the site of this collection.

The cores penetrated evaporite assemblages of anhydrite, gypsum, and dolomite, and flanking cyanobacterial (algal) flats. To the seaward were ooid shoals, barrier islands and reefs which have been subject to the spread of Abu Dhabi with accompanying industrial and urban construction and the dredging of channels to allow passage of shipping to the inner coastal areas. Christopher Kendall photographed the cores which now reside at the Jackson School of Geology in Austin Texas. This gallery is linked to a guide to the Holocene shallow water carbonates and supratidal evaporite tract that lines the southern coastal embayment of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf.

References

Butler, G. P., Kendall, C. G. St. C., Kinsman, D. J. J., Shearman, D. J., Skipworth, Sir Patrick A. d'E., 1965. Recent anhydrite from the Trucial Coast of the Arabian Gulf. Circ. Geol. Soc. London. 120, 3.

Butler, G., Kendall, C.G., Kinsman, D.J.J., Shearman, D.J., and Skipwith, P.A., 1965, Recent evaporite deposits along the Trucial Coast of the Arabian Gulf: Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, no. 1623, 91 p.

Butler, G.P., 1969, Modern evaporite deposition and geochemistry of coexisting brines, the sabkha, Trucial Coast, Arabian Gulf: Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, v. 39, no. 1, p. 70-89.

Butler, G.P., Harris, P.M. and Kendall, C.G.St.C., 1982. Recent evaporites from Abu Dhabi coastal flats. In: Hanford, C.R., Robert, G.L. and Graham, R.D. (eds). Depositional and diagenetic spectra of evaporites, p. 33 64. SEPM Core Workshop no. 3, Tulsa, Oklahoma.