Occurrence and distribution of Permian deposits
- Key People:
- Waldemar Christofer Brøgger
Permian rocks are common to all present-day continents; however, some have been moved—sometimes thousands of kilometres—from their original site of deposition by tectonic transport during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. For example, Permian glacial terrestrial and marine deposits typical of the cold high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere are now found in Antarctica, southern Africa, India, Thailand, and Tibet, and glacial deposits of the Northern Hemisphere laid down at that time are found in northeastern Siberia. By contrast, some Permian tropical and subtropical carbonate deposits, typical of deposition in low latitudes, were relocated to high latitudes. The present location of certain fossilized animals, endemic to the tropics during Permian time, suggests that other deposits were also moved great distances longitudinally (on a north-south axis). These deposits formed accreted terranes (smaller landmasses subsequently added onto continents) that became attached to the margins of some continents during Mesozoic and Cenozoic times. The present-day locations of Permian deposits are explained by the theory of plate tectonics. When the Permian globe is reconstructed, these apparent conflicts in rock deposition disappear, and a plausible arrangement of deposition, which is consistent with Permian climate patterns, emerges.
Carbonate provinces
Two tropical to subtropical carbonate provinces are recognized centred near the paleoequator but on opposite sides of Pangea. One includes the southwestern United States and northwestern South America. The other, which is much larger and has a more diverse fauna, includes the Tethys belt of rocks from Tunisia and the Carnic Alps of present-day Italy and Austria on the west through Turkey, Iran, southern China, Southeast Asia, and Japan to central British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The Tethys carbonate province was thoroughly disrupted by orogenic deformation (as the result of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics) after the Permian Period ended. Thus, the remains now reside in almost entirely dislocated fragments.
Sediments in tectonically active regions
In terms of geologic setting, Permian sediments deposited as thick sedimentary wedges along the tectonically active margins of the major cratons are least understood. Most of these Permian sediments have been thrust and involved in major geologic deformation. Much of the fossil evidence is from clastic material derived from shallow shelf environments or eroded from older rocks and deposited as deepwater debris fans. Thick deposits—perhaps originally 1 to 3 km (0.6 to 1.9 mi) thick—are known in central Nevada, Idaho, and northward into Canada. Similar deposits occur in the Middle East, China, Japan, and eastern Siberia.
Interleaved with these thick clastic wedges are other thrust slices of ocean-floor deposits. These are thinner, about 0.5 km (0.3 mi) thick or less, and are characterized by radiolarian-rich cherts, basaltic volcanic dikes, sills, and submarine lava flows, as well as silts and clays of the distal ends of turbidity flows. All Permian (and older) ocean-floor deposits and thick sedimentary wedges have been caught up in Mesozoic and Cenozoic subduction zones along plate boundaries and either form accretionary wedges or were lost to the Earth’s mantle.
Limestone
Associated with some oceanic basalts are thick accumulations of tropical and subtropical reef limestone that formed on seamounts and volcanic island arcs. Because limestone is comparatively less dense than adjacent oceanic rocks, such as basalt or chert, many of the Permian reef limestones were not as readily subducted. They are present in many accretionary wedges, such as those found in Tunisia, the Balkan Peninsula, Turkey, the Crimea (in Ukraine), the Middle East, northern India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, China, Japan, eastern Siberia, Alaska, the Western Cordillera of Canada and the United States, and a small part of northwestern Mexico.
Other limestones were deposited as reefs along the outer margins of sedimentary basins. Striking examples of these reefs form the Guadalupe Mountains of western Texas and New Mexico. Such reefs also occur in the subsurface along the Central Basin Platform in western Texas, where they are a source of petroleum. Similar reefs are found in northern England, Germany, and the subsurface of the North Sea. Lower Permian limestone reefs are found in the western and southern Urals of eastern Europe.
Basin sedimentation
Cratonic shelf sedimentation in low paleolatitudes during Permian time was characterized by the gradual withdrawal of shorelines and the progressive increase in eolian (wind-transported) sands, red beds, and evaporites. Many intracratonic basins—such as the Anadarko, Delaware, and Midland basins in the western United States; the Zechstein Basin of northwestern Europe; and the Kazan Basin of eastern Europe—show similar general changes. In most basins the inner parts became sites of red bed deposition during the Early Permian, followed by periods of extensive evaporite production. Sand sources along the ancestral Rocky Mountains supplied eolian sand and silt in great quantities.
The outer portions of the intracratonic basin systems, as in the Delaware and Zechstein basins, were involved in some transform faulting (process where two tectonic plates slide past one another) and extensional tectonics (the stretching and rifting of a continental plate), which produced landforms of considerable relief in some areas. Although some of this relief was from rotated fault blocks, most of it resulted from the very rapid growth of limestone reefs on upthrown blocks (that is, the sides of faults that appear to have moved upward) and the slower accumulation of clastic sediments on downthrown blocks.
At higher paleolatitudes, limestone is rare, and clastic rocks dominate the succession (the progressive sequence of rocks). Australia, Namibia, South Africa, peninsular India, southern Tibet, and southern Thailand all report Permo-Carboniferous tillite. These areas, as the paleogeographic reconstruction indicates, would have been in relatively high Gondwanan latitudes (closer to the South Pole) during the Permian Period, and thus their geology was affected by the expansion and contraction of glaciers. Tillites are also known from the northern high paleolatitudes in northeastern Siberia.
Some areas of Gondwana were tectonically active during Permian time, as evidenced by extensive basaltic, andesitic, and other volcanic rocks in eastern Australia. In addition, intracratonic sedimentary marine basins, such as the Carnarvon Basin in Western Australia, where nearly 5 km (3 mi) of Permian sediments accumulated, were formed.
Continental rocks were widespread on all cratons during the Permian Period. The Dunkard Group is a limnic (deposited in fresh water), coal-bearing succession that was deposited from the latest of Carboniferous times into Early Permian time along the western side of the then newly formed Appalachian Mountains. Coal-bearing Lower and Upper Permian beds—up to 3 km (1.9 mi) thick—are widely distributed in Australia, peninsular India (the lower part of the Gondwana System), southern Africa (the lower part of the Karoo System), the Kuznetsk Basin of western Siberia, the Paraná Basin of southern Brazil, and the Precordillera Basin of western Argentina. Red beds were common in the continental beds of tropical and subtropical paleolatitudes.
Correlation of Permian strata
Major subdivisions of the Permian Period are identified by extended periods of lowered sea level and by major faunal change. To overcome problems of shallow-water marine provincialism, biostratigraphers have increasingly turned to more open-ocean fossils, including cephalopods (which also are surprisingly provincial) and conodonts (which appear to be less provincial but whose biological affinities are poorly known).
Major boundaries and subdivisions of the Permian System
Early work
The history of the identification and acceptance of the Permian Period by geologists is in many ways the account of good deductive reasoning, a determined scientist, and an opportunity that was exploited to its fullest. Scottish geologist Roderick I. Murchison had been aware that the Coal Measures (unit of stratigraphy equal to the Pennsylvanian Series or Upper Carboniferous System) in northern England and Germany were overlain by red beds and poorly fossilized dolomitic limestones that had major unconformities at their base and top. Murchison reasoned that somewhere, perhaps outside northwestern Europe, a more complete stratigraphic succession would fill in these sedimentary gaps and would provide a more complete, better-preserved fossil assemblage.
In 1840 and 1841 Murchison found the missing stratigraphic succession in European Russia along the western flanks of the Ural Mountains, where he recognized a well-developed succession of rocks that both included rocks equivalent in age to the problematic red beds and dolomitic limestones of northwestern Europe and also filled the missing gaps below and above those sediments. He named these rocks the Permian System after the region of Perm, where they are particularly well developed.
Murchison included the red beds and evaporite beds now referred to as the Kungurian Stage in the lower part of his Permian System, while incorporating the nonmarine beds of the Tatarian Stage (a regional stage roughly equivalent to the Capitanian Stage plus a portion of the Wordian Stage) in its upper part. The upper portion of these nonmarine beds was subsequently shown to be Early Triassic in origin. The Ufimian-Kazanian Stage (a regional stage overlapping the current Roadian Stage and the remainder of the Wordian Stage) in between Murchison’s upper and lower parts of the Permian System was considered to be a close lithologic and age equivalent of the Zechstein of northwestern Europe.
Later work
A symposium organized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1939 established North American standard reference sections for the Permian consisting of four series—namely, the Wolfcampian, Leonardian, Guadalupian, and Ochoan—on the basis of the succession in West Texas and New Mexico.
Attempts in the 1950s and ′60s to unify the nomenclature within the Permian System into two (upper and lower) series based primarily on the Russian Platform and Ural successions proved unsuccessful. Currently the Permian System is subdivided into three series with global reference sections based on the Russian Cisuralian succession for the Lower Series, the West Texas Guadalupian for the Middle Series, and the Chinese Lopingian for the Upper Series.
Regional stages were considered necessary and important because they were based on strongly provincial faunal zonations that differ markedly from one region to the next. Within a single region or faunal province, the similarity of the succession of fossils and patterns of rock deposition permits ready age correlations; however, age correlations from one region to the next are more difficult and open to more questions. This differentiation of provincial faunas and their isolation from one another increase noticeably in the middle and later parts of the Permian Period.
Permian-Triassic boundary
Except for the central and eastern parts of the Tethys region, where local deposition was apparently continuous, the boundary between the Permian System and the overlying Triassic System is a hiatus of one to several million years. Outside of the Tethys region, the boundary between these two important systems—indeed, the boundary between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras—has not been readily defined. The latest Permian faunas were reduced to only a few remnant genera that were sensitive to stressful new environments. Typical Triassic lineages were mostly relicts from the latest Permian.
June R.P. Ross Charles A. Ross