Epeiric Depositional Models for the Lower Cretaceous Washita Group, North-Central Texas

RI0094. Epeiric Depositional Models for the Lower Cretaceous Washita Group, North-Central Texas, by R. W. Scott, D. Fee, R. Magee, and H. Laali. 23 p., 15 figs., 3 tables, 1978. ISSN: 0082335X: Print.

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ABSTRACT
The Washita Group in North-Central Texas and southeastern Oklahoma consists of up to 114 m of intercalated shale, limestone, and sandstone that accumulated in the shallow, epicontinental sea of the East Texas Basin. The Ouachita-Arbuckle Mountains to the north supplied terrigenous sediments, and the Central Texas platform to the south was a site of carbonate deposition leeward of the shelf margin of the Stuart City trend. Eleven lithofacies of the Washita were deposited within a repeatedly subsiding shelf basin that received an intermittent supply of terrigenous sediment. The deepest seaway formed after subsidence and was filled by a south-to-north progression of facies consisting of mollusk-echinoid wackestone on a shallow shelf, transitional packstone shale of deeper water, calcareous and sandy shales of the deepest water, thin-bedded sandstone of the shallower water shoreface, wavy lenticular sandstone and shale of the distal delta front, and deltaic estuarine trough-crossbedded sandstone. Following basin filling, the carbonate shelf prograded northward, grading into nearshore sediments. This produced the south-to-north succession of mollusk-echinoid wackestone to either oyster packstone shale, oyster packstone and quartzitic-oyster packstone or quartzitic mollusk-echinoid packstone of the shoreface.


Keywords: deposition, depositional models, lithofacies, North-Central Texas, Oklahoma, Ouachita, Texas, Washita



Citation
Scott, R. W., Fee, D., Magee, R., and Laali, H., 1978, Epeiric Depositional Models for the Lower Cretaceous Washita Group, North-Central Texas: The University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology, Report of Investigations No. 94, 23 p.