Abstract
Extensive geophysical studies have shown that the modern Bengal Deep-Sea Fan is the uppermost 4 km of the geosynclinal pile of sediments filling the Bay of Bengal, northeast Indian Ocean. The fan postdates the first collision of India and Asia and uplift of the ancestral Himalayas at the end of the Paleocene. Underlying the fan are continental rise sediments up to 12 km thick, which extend into the Bengal and Assam valleys, deposited off the margin of India following its separation from Antarctica and Australia in the Cretaceous. Deposits of the modern fan are structurally complex, particularly in the proximal part, where overlapping and interleaving natural levees and channel deposits make up the bulk of the section. Modern and buried channels in the proximal fan are tens of kilometers wide and hundreds of meters deep and are bounded by extensive natural levees, which terminate abruptly about 450 km downslope from the canyon mouth. Channel size and levee development are significantly less beyond this point. Turbidity currents which top the large channels of the proximal fan spread largely as sheet flow. Thus, in contrast to the proximal fan, most of the central and distal fan is sheet-flow-derived and shows lateral continuity in section, with isolated channels and channel deposits. Deformation is occurring simultaneously with deposition, as the fan and geosyncline pass obliquely northeast into the subduction zone of the Sunda Arc and Indoburman Ranges.
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Curray, J.R., Moore, D.G. (1974). Sedimentary and Tectonic Processes in the Bengal Deep-Sea Fan and Geosyncline. In: Burk, C.A., Drake, C.L. (eds) The Geology of Continental Margins. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01141-6_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01141-6_45
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