Page 163 - Carbonate Facies in Geologic History

150 The Lower Carboniferous Waul sort ian Facies

. • Crocoe
Settle _
• •
• •
. ....
• · CI,theroe

o

~ Block facies D Basin facies
~ Marginal reef facies

Fig.V-3. Distribution of facies in Upper Dinantian of northern England from Parkinson
(1957, Fig. 1) after Hudson and Cotton (1945). Shows marginal Waulsortian facies around the
north English basin and interior mounds at Clitheroe. Illustration with permission of first
author and American Association of Petroleum Geologists

much as one mile across, rising 500 feet above a platform of Chapel limestone
(Turner, 1957, p. 61; Pray, 1958). The most spectacular and best studied North
American outcrops of the facies are in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mex-
ico. Irregular bodies of limestone, which may represent the same sedimentary
processes, are known also in Alberta in the Upper Banff Formation on Grotto
Mountain.

Relation of Waul sort ian Facies to Regional Paleostructure

Despite the complexities of geosynclinal structure and sedimentation, European
Carboniferous paleogeography has been well worked out and facies can be readily
related to tectonics. In the Dinant basin of southern Belgium, a progression of
facies can be discerned south from the positive Brabant massif into a Hercynian
trough, bearing a fine-grained clastic turbidite (Culm). All these strata were iso-
c1inally folded late in the Paleozoic and it is only owing to many years of the most
painstaking stratigraphic work that exact facies relationships are ascertainable
within a time-stratigraphic framework (e.g., Mamet, 1962, Dupont, 1969). This
has involved the correlation of biostratigraphic zones based on corals and forami-
nifera in shelf facies with those based on ammonites and conodonts in the
troughs.