Salt tectonics in the Southern North Sea: controls on Late Pleistocene-Holocene geomorphology

Abstract

During the Upper Permian (c. 260 to 251 million years BP) over 1000 m of marine evaporites (the Zechstein Supergroup) accumulated in the North Sea (Cameron et al. 1992). Their subsequent burial promoted mobility on geological timescales resulting in thickness variations from less than 50 m, in regions of salt withdrawal, to more than 2500 m in some of the major salt diapirs (Cameron et al. 1992). Today, the deformed salt deposits encompass a wide range of structural morphologies (Jenyon 1986) and, in places, the crests of salt structures are within 100 m of the seabed (Cameron et al. 1992)….