Volcaniclastic rocks and reconstruction of a volcanosedimentary paleoenvironment in Campos Basin, SE Brazil

Abstract

Santonian-Campanian tuffaceous siltstone, epiclastic siltstone, arkose, and fossiliferous mudstone occur in a 45-m-thick section of well 1-BR-SA-37-RJS drilled in the southern Campos Basin, offshore SE Brazil. Well log data and petrographic and lithogeochemical data obtained from cutting samples were used to propose a schematic model of the volcano’s sedimentary paleoenvironment. The volcaniclasts in the tuffaceous siltstone and epiclastic siltstone are scoria basalts, typical of spatter cones associated with monogenetic fields worldwide. The combination of these features with the petrographic ones of the arkoses found in the same well interval is likely to be related to volcaniclastic processes taking place on the continental shelf. Ratios between the immobile trace elements of the volcaniclastic rocks can be explained by mixing between sources in the upper continental crust adjacent to southern Campos and the scoria basalts extruded in the monogenetic fields. The little differentiated, olivine-rich basalts extruded from the scoria and spatter cones suggest a rising asthenosphere mantle extending from hundreds of kilometers eastwards till southern Campos in the Santonian-Campanian. This may have resulted in regional discordances in the Santonian, both in the Campos and Santos basins, and also places the petroleum systems in the southern Campos Basin under the thermal influence of such a rising asthenosphere in the Santonian-Campanian.