Basement Faults and Their Relationships to Salt Plugs in the Arabian Platform in Southern Iran

Basement Faults and Their Relationships to Salt Plugs in the Arabian Platform in Southern Iran

Godratollah Farhoudi
Professor in Tectonics,
Department of Earth Sciences,
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
Email: farhoudi@geology.susc.ac.ir

Reza Derakhshani
Department of Earth Sciences,
College of Sciences,
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
Email: rezaderakhshani@yahoo.com

Jafar Rahnama-Rad
Department of Geology,
Islamic Azad University of Zahedan,
postal code 98167, Zahedan, Iran.
Email: jrahnama2003@yahoo.com

Introduction
Although the salt domes in southern Iran, especially those around Bandar-Abbas which is called “salt dome province” have been a matter of investigations resulting in numerous publications since 1908, this paper has following innovations:

There have been vague ideas that the salt domes are outcropped along basement faults (Ahmadzadeh and others, 1990), basement faults already known have not been mapped correctly. Besides, most of them have been mapped in this paper for the first time (fig. 2).
Although there exists a map on which epicenters have been located until 1976 (Berberian, 1976), this paper shows the accurate location of epicenters of the complete last century and their relation to the basement faults.

Previous works
The inland exposure of the Hormuz Series was first described by Pilgrim (1908, 1922, 1924), and Busk and Mayo (1918). The works of Richardson (1926, 1928) and Lees (1927,1931) marked the beginnings of modern studies of the Hormuz salt plugs, and subsequently 63 of them were mapped and described briefly by de Bockh et al in 1929. The first systematic study of these plugs was Harrison’s great contribution, the results of which were published in 1930, 1931, and 1956. Kent (1958) investigated nine hitherto plugs and Later published the results of some of the most recent work on the south Iranian salt dome province (1970, 1979). These two articles are particularly significant, as they contain new information on the age of the salt and the structural setting of the plugs in relation to regional tectonics in the Persian Gulf basin. Useful contributions were made by Gansser (1960) and Ala (1974) who reviewed the geology of salt domes in various parts of Iran, including the Persian Gulf, and summarized the current ideas of their origin. Player (1969), N.I.O.C. (1977), Esfandiyari and Barzegar (1979), Stocklin and Nabavi (1975), Ahmadzadeh Heravi et al (1990), Farhoudi (1978), Farhoudi and Ghazizadeh (1993), and Farhoudi (1984) also published some of the most recent works on the South Iranian salt dome province (Fig.1).

Figure 1. The diapir field is bounded by the Oman

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