1.

3 Geological Setting of The Area of Study and Previous Work

The Neogene Tabernas basin, one of the fault-controlled intramontane basins developed during
and after an Alpine-age collision between Iberia and North Africa (Montenant et al,1987a, b),
is in the province of Almeria at the Southeast of Spain. It is part of the Internal Zone of the
Betic Cordillera (Platt and Vissers, 1989). This Cordillera has a basin-and-range-type
morphology with elongated mountain ranges of mainly metamorphosed Paleozoic and
Mesozoic lithologies, which is separated by narrow elongated basins (Platt and Vissers,1989),
being the Tabernas-Sorbas one of those basins. Basement high confined the basin on the north-
northwest (Sierra De Los Filabres) and south-southwest (Sierra Alhamilla) supplied the basin
with different sediments being the dominant the clasts derived from the Nevado-Filabres
complex on the North, being the south sediment supplied from the Alpujarride Complex (Fig
1.2), which during the Tortonian and Lower Messinian that the Alhamilla palaeo-high became
really important for the stratigraphic evolution on the basin.

Figure 1.2 Sediment source for the Tabernas basin

There are different theories about how the basin formation. Montenant et al. (1987) stated that
the collision of Iberia and North Africa produced a pull apart basin while another theory
establishes the basin as an extensional half-graben (Visser et al. 1995). Another interpretation
sets the basin as a lateral ramp basin oriented parallel to westward verging (Poisson et al. 1999).
It can be observed in the western area of the basin that the sediment gets up to 1 km of mostly
marine sedimentary rocks. Seawater level, transgression-regression successions, changed
during the sedimentation period providing a range of sedimentology environments that vary
from continental to deep marine.