Paleocurrent Analysis of Upper Cretaceous Zagros Foreland Basin:A Case Study for Tanjero Formation in Sulaimaniya Area NE-Iraq

Abstract

Tanjero Formation is an Upper Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) unit, which crops out within the Imbricated and High Folded Zones in Northeastern Iraq. Its outcrop stretches as narrow northwest-southeast belt near and parallel to the Iranian border. The formation mainly consists of alternation of clastic rocks of sandstone, marl and calcareous shale with occurrence of very thick conglomerate and biogenic limestones. In this study many sedimentary structures are found in the Tanjero Formation, which have paleocurrent importance. These structures are cross bedding interference ripple marks, imbricated pebbles, elongate rudist and belemnite, plant debris, sole marks, valleys and channels. Most of these structures are found in the lower part. The paleocurrent analyses, as revealed by these structures, are presented in rose and stereonet diagrams, which show south and southwest directions. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ