View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Caltech Authors WAVE-MODIFIED TURBIDITES: COMBINED-FLOW SHORELINE AND SHELF DEPOSITS, CAMBRIAN, ANTARCTICA PAUL M. MYROW1, WOODWARD FISCHER2, AND JOHN W. GOODGE3 1Department of Geology, The Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80903, U.S.A. 2Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 20 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 3Department of Geological Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota 55812 e-mail:
[email protected] ABSTRACT: Sandstone tempestite beds in the Starshot Formation, cen- modern shelves (Pantin 1979; Parker 1982; Swift 1985). Duke (1990) and tral Transantarctic Mountains, were deposited in a range of shoreline Duke et al. (1991) took a uniformitarian approach to argue that ancient to shelf environments. Detailed sedimentological analysis indicates that tempestites were deposited by geostrophic combined ¯ows. They concluded these beds were largely deposited by wave-modi®ed turbidity currents. that one could reconcile the fact that aspects of many ancient tempestites These currents are types of combined ¯ows in which storm-generated were seemingly incongruous with deposition from geostrophic ¯ows (Leck- waves overprint ¯ows driven by excess-weight forces. The interpreta- ie and Krystinik 1989) if one understood the dynamics of such ¯ows. Since tion of the tempestites of the Starshot Formation as wave-dominated then, detailed studies have demonstrated that geostrophic combined ¯ows turbidites rests on multiple criteria. First, the beds are generally well were in fact important for producing some ancient sandy tempestites (Mar- graded and contain Bouma-like sequences. Like many turbidites, the tel and Gibling 1994; Beukes 1996; Midtgaard 1996).