Mineralogical and geochemical composition of the subsurface sediments at the mouth of Wadi Al- Hamd, Red Sea coast, Saudi Arabia: implication for provenance and climate

Mid-Late Holocene Paleoenvironmental and Sea Level Reconstruction on the Al Lith Red Sea Coast, Saudi Arabia

“…The central and southern Saudi coast has been tectonically stable during the Holocene (Manaa et al, 2016) and changes in accommodation space reflect eustatic changes in sea level (Ghandour and Haredy, 2019;Bantan et al, 2020;Ghandour et al, 2020). These changes vary along the Red Sea coast in the timing and the spatial distribution (Al-Mikhlafi et al, 2021).…”

“…Most of these studies have been performed on deep sediment records (Arz et al, 2003(Arz et al, , 2006Biton et al, 2008;Rohling et al, 2008;Edelman-Furstenberg et al, 2009;Trommer et al, 2010Trommer et al, , 2011. However, numerous studies have been carried out along the Red Sea coast (Moustafa et al, 2000;Hein et al, 2011;Bantan, 2013, 2015;Basaham et al, 2014;Ghandour et al, 2016;Al-Zubieri et al, 2017;Nabhan and Yang, 2018;Pavlopoulos et al, 2018;Bantan et al, 2019Bantan et al, , 2020. Most of these latter studies dealt with past environmental changes based on micropaleontology (Abu-Zied and Bantan, 2013Bantan, , 2015Pavlopoulos et al, 2018;Bantan et al, 2019), and coral reefs (Moustafa et al, 2000;Manaa et al, 2016).…”

Whole-rock and clay mineralogy as paleoenvironmental tracers during the Late Holocene sedimentary evolution of the Doñana National Park (SW Spain)

“…The clay fraction (< 2 μm) was separated by a standard sedimentation method. Before the separation, carbonates were removed using 0.6 M acetic acid (Barahona, 1974).…”

“…The measure of the d(060) reflection in random polycrystalline powder of the clay fraction was used to establish the dioctahedral (1.49-1.50 Å) or trioctahedral (1.52-1.53 Å) character of clay minerals (Moore and Reynolds Jr., 1997). In addition, the mineral intensity factors (MIF) method was applied to XRD reflection intensity ratios normalized to 100% with calibration constants for the quantitative estimation of mineral contents (Schulz, 1964;Barahona, 1974;Chung, 1974).…”

“…They have been also used in the interpretation of paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental changes, e.g. to reconstruct palaeoclimatic conditions (Hanna et al, 2018); to determine the sediment provenance (Bantan et al, 2020); in the analysis of hydrodynamic processes in coastal paleoenvironments (Carretero et al, 2002); for paleogeographic reconstructions (Brunovic et al, 2020), and to determine sedimentological evolution in littoral environments (Lamourou et al, 2017). In these areas, clay minerals are stable in their formation environment in most cases; therefore, there is a direct correlation between the type, chemical composition and crystallinity of a specific clay mineral and the palaeoenvironmental conditions under which the mineral was formed (Keller, 1970;Carretero et al, 2002).…”