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Rotliegend sediment distribution: a result of late Carboniferous movements

, Consultant, 4 Morven Way, Ballater, Grampian, AB3 5SF, UK

The distribution of Rotliegend desert sandstones in Northwest Europe was mainly the outcome of four geological events that originated in the Carboniferous or earlier.

(1) Westphalian culmination of collision between north-moving Laurussia and the faster moving Gondwana resulted in the E-W trending Variscan Mountains, which were to be the main source of Rotliegend fluvial sediment over successor basins to the former back-arc foreland.

(2) During final convergence between Laurussia and Gondwana, the western Variscan orocline probably acted as a wedge that put Laurussia into transtension and, utilizing old lines of weakness, the Iapetus Suture between the Scottish-Greenland and Norwegian Caledonides and the Tornquist Line, initiated NW-SE and conjugate NE-SW systems of grabens.

(3) Late orogenic relative movement between Laurussia and Gondwana also caused strike-slip faulting, related rapid collapse of the Variscan Mountains and the extrusion of Lower Rotliegend volcanics through parts of the Variscan foreland. The end of volcanism was followed by thermal subsidence of the Permian basins, many of them at rates that exceeded those of sedimentation.

(4) The northward drift of Laurussia carried NW Europe from the equatorial zone of Carboniferous coal deposition to the latitude of a northern hemisphere trade-wind desert, where it lay in the rain shadow of the Variscan Mountains.

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