Economic significance of Triassic deposits

Marine deposits

Major linear depositional troughs developed around Panthalassa, the ancestor of the Pacific Ocean, during the Early and Middle Triassic. Great quantities of marine sediments collected in these troughs, as indicated by deposits—now mainly sandstones, shales, and graywackes—located in the western Pacific basinal belt (New Zealand and Japan) and the eastern basinal belt (Alaska, Arctic Canada, British Columbia, western United States, and the west coast of South America). For example, more than 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) of Triassic sediments accumulated in the Sverdrup Basin of Arctic Canada. The Tethys Sea, a deep, narrow arm of Panthalassa stretching along an east-west belt separating what is now Africa from southern Europe, also received basinal deposits.

In the northern Tethyan trough, marine deposits now occur in the Alps, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the Himalayas mainly as limestones, with deep-sea sediments such as those in radiolarian cherts, which formed in troughs in the deeper parts of the Tethys Sea. To the south was the southern Tethyan trough, bordering Gondwana and stretching from northern India through the Middle East to northern Africa. Shallow shelf-sea embayments of limited distribution occurred landward of these troughs and are represented mainly by limestones in low latitudes, as around the margins of the Tethys Sea. Such tropical and subtropical shelf seas were warm and often supported small reefs, the forerunners of the more extensive coral reefs of today. Although the Permian-Triassic extinction of rugose and tabulate corals resulted in an absence of Lower Triassic corals, small reeflike mounds of early Middle Triassic age were succeeded later in Middle Triassic times by more extensive reef complexes that retained some Permian biotic elements. Such reefs have been described from the Tirolian Alps of Austria and the Dolomites of Italy. Late Triassic (Norian-Rhaetian) reef complexes, more modern in aspect and dominated for the first time by scleractinian (stony) corals and calcareous pharetronid sponges, occur as thick sequences in the Dachstein and Steinplatte regions of Austria and Germany, as well as in Iran and the Himalayas.

In the circum-Pacific region some shelf-sea deposits, generally clastic in nature (sandstones and shales), occur in Western Australia, Siberia, and the circum-Arctic region, including Arctic Canada, Alaska, eastern Greenland, and Spitsbergen.

Continental deposits

Continental sediments dominated by red beds (that is, sandstones and shales of red colour) and evaporites accumulated on land throughout the Triassic Period. The Bunter and the Keuper Marl of Germany and the New Red Sandstone of Britain are examples of such red beds north of Tethys, while to the south are similar deposits in India, Australia, South Africa, and Antarctica. Although deposits of this kind usually indicate accumulation in arid regions such as inland desert basins, the red beds may also represent sediments of fluvial or lacustrine origin suggestive of seasonal precipitation. Large basins containing Triassic continental sediments occur in South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina) and in western North America (particularly in Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, and Colorado). In eastern North America great thicknesses of sedimentary rocks of continental origin were deposited during the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic in a series of fault-bounded basins, of which the Newark Basin is probably the best-known. There rocks comprising the Newark Supergroup consist of sequences of continental red clastics with dinosaur tracks and mudcracks, along with black shales containing fossils of freshwater crustaceans and fish. These deposits indicate a depositional environment of rivers draining into freshwater lakes in a generally arid or semiarid region, which from paleomagnetic evidence appears to have been located about 20° north of the paleoequator.

Igneous rocks

Triassic igneous rocks are not common, and reliable radiometric dates are available only from Upper Triassic rocks. Examples of extrusive basalt flows are known from Australia, South America, and eastern North America. The well-known Palisades Sill of the Newark Supergroup was formerly regarded as Triassic in age, but this diabase intrusion, which is 300 metres (1,000 feet) thick, has yielded a potassium-argon age of 193 million years, indicating an Early Jurassic origin.