This is the Home Page of "Turbidite Depositional Systems". These notes were prepared, mainly for the geoscientists who have followed my short-courses on the West Africa offshore, particularly Angola Offshore, in which turbidite reservoirs are paramount.

Clicking on the interlinks (underlined text and bots), you can navigate through an explanatory text and associated plates, which will be exhaustively discussed during the work sessions.

On this sea floor dip map of the Alaminos Canyon area, in the Gulf of Mexico (USA), it is quite easy to recognize the rectilinear and meandering geometry of the turbidite currents and associated depositional systems. Such a turbidite currents are induced, probably, by slope failures and/or flush floods of the streams in the updip deltaic plain. Theoretically, when the density of a turbidite current is much higher than the density of the water body in which it flows or in which it enters, the geometry of the current, that is to say, its trajectory is, roughly, rectilinear and, practically, there is not significant deposition (the majority of the carried material is transported down to the lower continental slope or abyssal plain). On the contrary, when the density of the turbidite current is more or less that of the water body, the turbidite current meanders down the slope and deposition takes place, mainly as overbanking deposits with a predominant shaly facies. In other words, when the charge of the turbidite current is high (transporting a lot of sandprone material), its course and associated slope incision (over a continental or deltaic slope) is quite rectilinear, what is not the case when the amount of the sediments transported (generally shaleprone) by the current is small. In addition, in the first case, the infilling (deposition) is, usually, posterior to the incision and it is made in retrogradational manner (from the lower to upper part of the slope), while in the second case, deposition (shaleprone sediments) takes place during the meandering flow of the turbiditic current, generally, as overbank deposits with a gully-wing geometry (in a strike cross-section).

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Last modification : September, 2014