Coated Grains Along the Dead Sea Shore

Coated grains form in a number of environments. In the modern marine environment, the cortex of coated grains contains individual aragonite crystals with their long axes oriented tangential to the nucleus. In the cortex of some coated grains, the long axes or aragonite (and calcite) crystals are normal to the rims forming ooids with a radial fabric. Modern coated grains having this fabric occur in hypersaline waters such as the Great Salt Lake of Utah; in Baffin Bay, off Laguna Madre, Texas; in lakes in the Kulundin Steppe; or in thick accumulations of algal mats, as found in sea-marginal pools of the modern Red Sea, and along the west coast of Australia (Vital 1948, Friedman et al. 1973, Kahle 1974, Sandberg 1975, Davies and Martin 1976, Halley 1977, Friedman and Sanders 1978, p. 52–53).