This panorama shows an Upper Miocene succession, la Rambla de Lanujar, in the Betic Cordillera, featuring in one of our field trips to Tabernas, Almería, Spain.
Apart from being a popular Hollywood Movies backdrop, this panorama helps participants assess and plan a petroleum development in a channelised turbidite system: Multiple erosive and infill phases that impact reservoir complexity through permeability contrasts. These are things that are not reconcilable in seismic or log data and a field visit is therefore very useful to fully appreciate this.
The field trip attendees are looking at a south-north-oriented cross-section of a channel complex which is encased in and onlapping onto hemipelagic fine-grained marlstones.
The channel is of Tortonian age (Upper Miocene) belonging to the Sartenella Formation. The turbidites are texturally and compositionally immature displaying a mixed load of fine-grained sand to gravel. At least five stacked channel units can be distinguished, with a progressively southward shift in the outcrop. The overall channel flow direction is eastward along the Tabernas basin axis away from the observer.
