Authigenic Minerals and Diagenesis in The Clastic Sediments of The Ghar Formation South and Southeast Iraq.

Abstract

Study of clay minerals (Kaolinite,Iillite and Illite-Smectite mixed layers) in the clastic sediments of the Ghar Formation (Upper Oligocene-Lower Miocene) is the main indicator for the variation of the pore waters responsible for the eodiagenetic processes affecting on these sediments. Variation of these clay minerals are used also to distinguish the sedimentary environments of the Ghar Formation as transitional environment from fluvial into marine. The genetic relations of these clay minerals and their semi quantitative proportions by XRD and SEM are used also to distinguish the authigenic minerals and their paragenetic sequence. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ