Al Khlata glacial deposits in the Oman Mountains and their implications

Abstract: A thick succession of Al Khlata glacio-lacustrine deposits, including diamictites, crops out in the Wadi Daiqa inlier and there are other possible Al Khlata outcrops in Wadi Amdeh and Wadi al Arabiyin. These outcrops in the OmanMountains are 100 km north of where the Al Khlata had been thought to pinch out by non-deposition or erosion. Fossil spores and pollen from Wadi Daiqa are highly carbonized having been subject to greenschist facies metamorphism, but are still clearly identifiable as taxa from the Late Carboniferous 2159A zone of the oil-producing areas of interior Oman. This northernmost Al Khlata is sand rich and interpreted to be glacio-lacus-trine. Previously the sand-dominated Al Khlata successions north of the Central Oman High have been considered to be glacio-fluvial outwash largely based on their context. The Al Khlata deposits in Wadi Daiqa and the underlying several-kilometre-thick Amdeh succession are preserved in Saih Hatat, probably in a continuation of the Ghaba Salt Basin that itself overlies an accreted terrane from the Pan African orogeny. Gold Open Access: This article is published under the terms of the CC-BY 3.0 license. Al Khlata glacial deposits occur widely in the sub-surface of interior Oman. They are absent along the easternmost coastal area and were believed absent from northern Oman and the Oman Moun-tains due to non-deposition. Here we describe a c. 300 m succession of Al Khlata P9 deposits from Wadi Daiqa, and other possible outcrops of Al Khlata lithologies in the Saih Hatat area. The Wadi Daiqa sections are important in being outcrop analogues of sand-prone oil-producing intervals in the subsurface of southern Oman. Unfortunately, the most easily accessible section was flooded with the filling of the Wadi Daiqa water reservoir in 2009. The better-known outcrops at Al Khlata, in the Huqf area, are of younger P5 and P1 age and are predominantly of non-reservoir facies. History of work on th