Petroleum geoscience by Jon Gluyas & Richard Swarbrick, Blackwell Publishing, 2003. No. of pages: 359. ISBN: 0 632 03767 9.
✍ Scribed by Andrew Hurst
- Book ID
- 102223881
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 39 KB
- Volume
- 40
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0072-1050
- DOI
- 10.1002/gj.1006
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
feeding 'development'. Plastic greenhouses spread ghoulish green across the plains. But little changes in the hills. You will walk all day and meet no one. Except for geologists and geomorphologists, that is.
Almerı ´a, especially its Neogene sedimentary basins, is one of the most visited Earth Science areas in Europe: a mecca for field courses. Yet the basins-Vera, Almerı ´a, Sorbas, Tabernas-despite spelling out VAST, are tiny. None is more than 30 km across, and each is filled by just a few hundred metres of sediment, all less than 8 million years old. The geology should be simple; but it is not. The basins formed late in the Miocene as the Betic mountain chain collapsed into jostling fault blocks. Their sediments record rapid changes in infill, from megabreccia and turbidite influx to clear-water reefs. Simultaneously there was temperate to tropic climate fluctuation, and then the sudden devastation and aftermath of the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the area perched high and dry above the deep desiccated Mediterranean basin. Rapid reflooding was followed by equally abrupt Pliocene uplift and erosion that swept down fans of alluvial detritus. Inland, dark fault-bounded metamorphic massifs, 2000 m high, loom above the deeply gullied ochre basins. Seaward lie serrated ridges, remnants of calc-alkaline volcanic islands, uplifted from the Albora ´n Sea. And the story is not over: earthquakes have destroyed Vera town twice in the past 500 years, and Almerı ´a city four times-just a few seconds ago in geological time-as Iberia rotates and rises ahead of Africa.
In addition to this breathtaking geological diversity there is the exceptional geomorphology, all within an area scarcely more than 50 km square. A guide is essential to this region; and in this compact book what a great guide it has got! When I first visited Almerı ´a, in 1985, I had a hard time figuring out the geology. This book would have made things so much easier. It bursts with information and illustrations presented in a clear and concise style that leads straight to the rocks to give a blow-by-blow account of them. There are 19 excursions, mostly one day each. Everything is here: