Rift Tectonics and Limestone Sedimentation: Jurassic of the Central and Eastern High Atlas, Morocco: ABSTRACT

The central and eastern High Atlas ranges of southern Morocco represent deposition in an Early to Middle Jurassic rift which first collected continental basalts, red beds, and evaporites. Carbonate deposition was initiated by a euxinic phase, followed by a mosaic of normal marine limestones and marls controlled by regional subsidence and local differential fault-block movements and overprinted by global sea level changes. The High Atlas is now an en echelon series of high-angle reverse faults, creating abrupt and discontinuous fault-bounded ridges separated by broad synclines. Facies relationships of the Jurassic carbonates show that the faults were originally synrift normal faults, probably transtensional, now structurally reversed. Overlying Aalenian to Bajocian shelf limestones prograded into an axial seaway filled with thick marls, punctuated in the Bajocian by horizons of spectacularly exposed coralgal reefs which appear structurally isolated on separate fault blocks. Sedimentation eventually outpaced subsidence, culminating in continental deposits as the sea finally retreated in the mid-Dogger. Although abundant potential source rocks of this rift are thermally overmature, the basin serves as a well-exposed model for comparison with carbonate-filled rifts elsewhere.