Image of the week #4

Apologies for the brief hiatus in the image of the week. It's the start of term, I'm moving house, and I have an interview on Monday. Not that I'm making excuses or anything.



This is a nice illustration of sedimentation and tectonics in the Suez rift. The picture is taken on the footwall of the Nukhul fault, looking west into the syn-rift units preserved in the hanging-wall. There is an approximately east-striking fault cutting the syn-rift units. The Abu Zenima Formation can be seen thinning dramatically onto the footwall of that fault. The thinning is accomodated partly by onlap onto the underlying pre-rift units, and mainly by erosional truncation at the base of the Nukhul Formation. In the hanging-wall, the Nukhul Formation is slightly thicker than in the footwall, and also contains a higher proportion of fluvial conglomerate. The displacement on the fault can be seen to increase downward.