Document type

Article

Version

Accepted version

Publication date

Publication license

cc-by-nc (c) The Authors, 2024
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/211681

Salt-pillow formation during inversion of evaporite-filled half graben – Insights from seismic data interpretation and integrated analogue-numerical modelling

Journal Title

Director/Tutor

Additional contribution

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Abstract

The Mid-Polish Anticlinorium is a regional structure that formed during Late Cretaceous inversion of the Permian-Mesozoic Polish Basin. Within the anticlinorium, local salt pillows built of the Upper Permian (Zechstein) evaporites are often located above reverse faults that accommodated basement inversion. Seismic data from the Szubin area in central Poland were used to guide a combined analogue and numerical modelling study to test whether locally thicker evaporites deposited within a half-graben, could indeed give rise to a salt pillow formed above the half-graben’s hanging wall during its inversion. The results of the two approaches are internally consistent and prove that such a genetic relationship is fully viable, with the most important variables being the size of the half-graben, the viscosity of the salt, and the presence of any erosion of the pillow structure. Thus, the existence of salt pillows along the major inversion zones of the Mid-Polish Anticlinorium could possibly be used as indicators for the location of syn-depositional half-grabens during deposition of the Zechstein evaporites. This in turn might suggest that even in the basin center, shallower areas might have existed above the footwalls of such half-graben during Zechstein deposition, characterized by smaller thicknesses and somewhat different facies arrangement. Similar concepts likely apply to other intracontinental salt basins that experienced rifting and then inversion. 

Citation

Citation

KRZYWIEC, P., et al. Salt-pillow formation during inversion of evaporite-filled half graben – Insights from seismic data interpretation and integrated analogue-numerical modelling. Journal of Structural Geology. 2024. Vol. 184. ISSN 0191-8141. [consulted: 8 of October of 2026]. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/211681

Export metadata

JSON - METS

Share record