Economic significance of Triassic deposits
Few mineral deposits of major economic importance were formed during the Triassic. Workable coal deposits are known from Arctic Canada, Russia, Ukraine, China, Japan, Australia, and Antarctica. Oil and gas occurrences are not common, but potentially important gas reserves have been discovered in Triassic rocks of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. Halite (rock salt) is mined from Triassic evaporites in England, France, Germany, and Austria. Low-grade uranium ores such as carnotite occur in continental deposits of Triassic age in the western United States.
Major subdivisions of the Triassic System
The Triassic Period is divided into three epochs: the Early Triassic (252 million to 247 million years ago), the Middle Triassic (about 247 million to 235 million years ago), and the Late Triassic (about 235 million to 201 million years ago; see the rocks (mostly of sedimentary origin) that define these time intervals make up the Triassic System, which is broken down into three series: Lower, Middle, and Upper. Each of these series is further subdivided into stages, substages, and biozones, mainly on the basis of vertical ranges of rapidly evolving biota, radiometric dates, and magnetic reversals on the seafloor and in the sedimentary rocks, where available. Subdividing time and rock units in this way allows more precise dating of geologic events and correlation of rocks between areas. However, because there are relatively few igneous rocks to provide reliable radiometric dates, the time spans and absolute ages cited by different investigators for the Triassic Period tend to vary. Such dates are subject to revision as new and more accurate age determinations are made.). The
Early subdivision of the Triassic was based primarily on the extensive and highly fossiliferous Alpine (western Tethyan) sequence of marine strata exposed in Austria, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It was there that the type sections, or stratotypes, for the Middle Triassic stages Anisian and Ladinian and the Upper Triassic stages Carnian, Norian, and Rhaetian were first established. The two stages of the Lower Triassic, the Induan and Olenekian, are based on stratotypes in the Salt Range of Pakistan and in Siberia, respectively. While these stage names are now generally accepted internationally, alternative names for part or all of the Triassic are used in Japan and New Zealand.
Occurrence and distribution of Triassic deposits
Major linear depositional troughs developed around Panthalassa, the ancestor of the Pacific Ocean, during the Early and Middle Triassic. Great quantities of marine sediments collected in these troughs, as indicated by deposits—now mainly sandstones, shales, and graywackes—located in the western Pacific basinal belt (New Zealand and Japan) and the eastern basinal belt (Alaska, Arctic Canada, British Columbia, western United States, and the west coast of South America). For example, more than 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) of Triassic sediments accumulated in the Sverdrup Basin of Arctic Canada. The Tethys Sea, a deep, narrow arm of Panthalassa stretching along an east-west belt separating what is now Africa from southern Europe, also received basinal deposits.
In the northern Tethyan trough, marine deposits now occur in the Alps, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the Himalayas mainly as limestones, with deep-sea sediments such as those in radiolarian cherts, which formed in troughs in the deeper parts of the Tethys Sea. To the south was the southern Tethyan trough, bordering Gondwana and stretching from northern India through the Middle East to northern Africa. Shallow shelf-sea embayments of limited distribution occurred landward of these troughs and are represented mainly by limestones in low latitudes, as around the margins of the Tethys Sea. Such tropical and subtropical shelf seas were warm and often supported small reefs, the forerunners of the more extensive coral reefs of today. Although the Permian-Triassic extinction of rugose and tabulate corals resulted in an absence of Lower Triassic corals, small reeflike mounds of early Middle Triassic age were succeeded later in Middle Triassic times by more extensive reef complexes that retained some Permian biotic elements. Such reefs have been described from the Tirolian Alps of Austria and the Dolomites of Italy. Late Triassic (Norian-Rhaetian) reef complexes, more modern in aspect and dominated for the first time by scleractinian (stony) corals and calcareous pharetronid sponges, occur as thick sequences in the Dachstein and Steinplatte regions of Austria and Germany, as well as in Iran and the Himalayas.
In the circum-Pacific region some shelf-sea deposits, generally clastic in nature (sandstones and shales), occur in Western Australia, Siberia, and the circum-Arctic region, including Arctic Canada, Alaska, eastern Greenland, and Spitsbergen.
Continental sediments dominated by red beds (that is, sandstones and shales of red colour) and evaporites accumulated on land throughout the Triassic Period. The Bunter and the Keuper Marl of Germany and the New Red Sandstone of Britain are examples of such red beds north of Tethys, while to the south are similar deposits in India, Australia, South Africa, and Antarctica. Although deposits of this kind usually indicate accumulation in arid regions such as inland desert basins, the red beds may also represent sediments of fluvial or lacustrine origin suggestive of seasonal precipitation. Large basins containing Triassic continental sediments occur in South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina) and in western North America (particularly in Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, and Colorado). In eastern North America great thicknesses of sedimentary rocks of continental origin were deposited during the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic in a series of fault-bounded basins, of which the Newark Basin is probably the best-known. There rocks comprising the Newark Supergroup consist of sequences of continental red clastics with dinosaur tracks and mudcracks, along with black shales containing fossils of freshwater crustaceans and fish. These deposits indicate a depositional environment of rivers draining into freshwater lakes in a generally arid or semiarid region, which from paleomagnetic evidence appears to have been located about 20° north of the paleoequator.
Triassic igneous rocks are not common, and reliable radiometric dates are available only from Upper Triassic rocks. Examples of extrusive basalt flows are known from Australia, South America, and eastern North America. The well-known Palisades Sill of the Newark Supergroup was formerly regarded as Triassic in age, but this diabase intrusion, which is 300 metres (1,000 feet) thick, has yielded a potassium-argon age of 193 million years, indicating an Early Jurassic origin.
Correlation of Triassic strata
Correlation is the technique of piecing together information from widely separated rock outcrops in order to create an accurate chronological profile of an entire geologic time period. In order to accomplish this, geologists attempt to measure the absolute ages of rock strata using techniques such as radioisotope dating, or they attempt to establish relative ages of strata by comparing their mineralogy, fossil content, and other attributes. The Triassic System is dominated by sedimentary rocks, which, unlike igneous rocks, generally do not yield reliable radiometric data, which are used to establish absolute age. Therefore, the relative ages of Triassic sedimentary rocks—derived from the techniques of superposition, lithology, and biochronology—must be used for correlation. Of these three tools, biochronology, the dating of rock strata according to the known succession of fossilized life-forms found within them, has traditionally been regarded as the most accurate and reliable, although more modern methods of sequence stratigraphy are improving the accuracy of interregional correlation.
While conodonts, palynomorphs (spores and pollen of plants), radiolarians, and tetrapods are now proving to be useful for correlation of marine and nonmarine strata from the Triassic, the most widely used fossils in biochronology are still those of the ammonoids. This is because these pelagic swimming or floating cephalopods fulfill the basic requirements for ideal zone fossils: they were widespread geographically, evolved rapidly, and were not dependent on any type of substrate. Ammonoids thrived in Triassic seas in offshore environments along with pelagic bivalves such as Claraia and Halobia. While ammonoids have been used successfully to erect a series of biozones, each one probably representing no more than one million years, the problem has been to find complete sequences of undisturbed marine strata that represent all stages of Triassic time in any one general region. Because the Germanic facies (the rock series originally proposed in the 19th century as representing the Triassic Period) are mostly of continental, not marine, origin, the marine Triassic of the Alps has traditionally been used as a standard for the period, with the two most important localities being Salzkammergut in the northern Austrian Alps and St. Cassian (now San Cassiano) in the Dolomites to the south. Unfortunately, there are very few ammonoids common to both these sections. Indeed, the Alpine succession in general is not without its drawbacks when an attempt is made to determine sequential faunal relationships. In the red Hallstatt limestone facies in the Alps and throughout the Tethyan region, ammonoids often occur in lenses (that is, deposits bounded by converging surfaces that are thick in the middle and thin toward the edges) in areas of tectonic complexity. Furthermore, faunas are often condensed through possible postdepositional submarine solution, which results in “cemeteries” of ammonoids of different ages in close association. Also, fracturing and solution occurring at nearly the same time during the Triassic apparently caused local mixing and inversion of zones as younger beds collapsed into solutional voids in older strata. Such condensed and mixed assemblages have led to difficulties for paleontologists attempting to use the Alpine zonal scheme as a standard for correlating marine Triassic sequences in other regions. Nevertheless, the importance of the Alpine Triassic should not be underestimated in the history of Triassic studies, because by the end of the 19th century its fossils permitted initial correlations to be made with the Germanic Muschelkalk and with marine sequences in the Arctic, Pacific, Himalayas, and Pakistan.
North American strata
Isolated occurrences of marine Triassic rocks in western North America were known by 1890, but discoveries of several hundred new localities from the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin and the Sverdrup Basin of Arctic Canada between about 1955 and 1980 added much information to the biochronology of the region. It also was recognized that more than half the world’s known genera of ammonoids occurred in North America, testifying to the cosmopolitan nature of the group. Dissatisfaction with the problems of using the Alpine succession as a standard for Triassic time led to the proposal of a new zonal scheme based on relatively complete and in-place sequences in Arctic Canada, northeastern British Columbia, and the western United States. This proposal was primarily the work of the Canadian paleontologist E. Timothy Tozer, who, with the American paleontologist Norman J. Silberling, provided precisely defined stratotypes for all the recognized North American biozones. The North American zonal scheme is now accepted by most authorities as the standard for Triassic global biostratigraphy and allows Alpine (western Tethyan) and Boreal (Siberian) zones to be placed in their proper chronological sequence.
It should be borne in mind that, because of the endemism (restriction in the geographic distribution) of most ammonoid species, it is often difficult to correlate faunal assemblages between widely separated regions. Because ammonoids and conodonts are found together, a conodont biochronology can often be accurately intercalibrated with the ammonoid zonation, as established for North America by Michael J. Orchard. Additional tools for correlation include the development of a Triassic sea-level curve for the Sverdrup Basin of Arctic Canada and a Triassic magnetic polarity timescale derived from paleomagnetic studies of mainly sedimentary sequences. Correlating rocks by means of polarity time units imprinted on rocks at the time they form is known as magnetochronostratigraphy and is likely to become more important in the future.
Establishing Triassic boundaries
The Permian-Triassic boundary
The exact position of both the Permian-Triassic and Triassic-Jurassic boundaries has been the subject of great controversy for many years. The transition from latest Permian to earliest Triassic is nowhere represented by a continuous (conformable) succession of marine strata containing fossils that are not open to ambiguous age interpretation. The Germanic facies is of little value in the dispute, for there the continental Bunter Formation rests unconformably on Upper Permian strata of the Zechstein basin. The marine equivalent of the Bunter in the Alps is the Werfen Limestone; there the distinctive Lower Triassic bivalve genus Claraia is found in apparently conformable contact with the underlying Bellerophon Limestone, in which undisputed Permian faunas are found. However, recent studies suggest that the lowermost Werfen may contain Permian fossils. In the Himalayas Claraia occurs with the ammonoid Otoceras in the so-called Otoceras beds, but are these beds Permian or Triassic? A Triassic age is suggested by the presence of Claraia, but otoceratids also occur in undisputed Permian strata in the Dzhulfa (Julfa) region in Armenia near the Iranian border. It was agreed as long ago as the early 1900s that the Armenian otoceratids were not in the strictest sense identical with Otoceras and that the Himalayan Otoceras beds should define the base of the Triassic System. This issue, however, has been raised again by those who regard the Otoceras beds as Permian rather than Triassic.
At key localities where apparently conformable sequences occur, as in Armenia, Pakistan, Kashmir, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, Tibet, China, Siberia, and northern Alaska, the boundary beds—often of limited thickness—usually contain mixtures of Permian-type and Triassic-type faunas or show evidence of an unconformity or paraconformity (that is, an unconformity in parallel strata that is virtually indistinguishable from a simple bedding plane because no effects of erosion are discernible). It is these transitional beds that are the crux of the boundary problem. In the Salt Range of Pakistan, for instance, Permian brachiopods are found in close association with undisputed Triassic fossils, which suggests the possibility of Permian relics living in earliest Triassic time. Yet recent studies suggest that both latest Permian and earliest Triassic strata are missing in this section. In East Greenland mixed faunas occur at the boundary, with Triassic ammonoids in association with Permian productacean brachiopods, but the latter appear to be derived, having been incorporated into Triassic sediments by reworking. A similar situation may prevail at the famous Guryul Ravine section in Kashmir. Studies on new sections in Tibet (Selong-Xishan) and China (Shangsi, Meishan) have not yet led to agreement on whether there is continuous sedimentation between the Permian and Triassic or a well-disguised unconformity. Tozer supports the latter view and, furthermore, believes that there is evidence of a worldwide unconformity (often difficult to recognize) at the base of the Otoceras zone. He advocates that this level should once again define the Permian-Triassic boundary, since it clearly records a universal geologic event of great significance to marine biotas. Accordingly, he has proposed a stratotype for the boundary at the base of the Blind Fjord Formation of northwestern Axel Heiberg Island in Arctic Canada, where the O. concavum zone (equivalent to the O. woodwardi zone of the Himalayas) rests unconformably on Permian strata. However, recent opinion indicates that a more suitable place for the global stratotype section and point (GSSP) for the Permian-Triassic boundary might be at Meishan, where it is taken to be the base of the Hindeodus parvus (the same as Orchard’s Isarcicella parva) conodont zone. This proposal awaits formal ratification by the Subcommission on Triassic Stratigraphy.
The Triassic-Jurassic boundary
The exact position of the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic has been less contentious but not without its problems. Traditionally, marine rocks stratigraphically above the Keuper Marl in Germany and the New Red Sandstone in Britain have been regarded as either uppermost Triassic or lowermost Jurassic. These rocks contain the distinctive bivalve species Rhaetavicula contorta but no ammonoids. Rocks of this R. contorta zone in northwestern Europe have been correlated with the stratotype of the Rhaetian Stage, the marine Kössen beds in the Rhaetian Alps, mainly on the basis of the common occurrence of R. contorta. The Alpine Rhaetian contains a few ammonoids that are regarded as Late Triassic in affinity but not exclusively Rhaetian. The correlation of the Rhaetian of northwestern Europe with that of the Alps has been questioned, however, and it has been suggested that the former may actually be lowermost Jurassic in age. While most biostratigraphers would include at least the Alpine Rhaetian Stage in the Triassic, Tozer and others have advocated abandoning the term Rhaetian as a formal stage name and assigning Alpine Rhaetian rocks and their correlatives in North America and elsewhere to the uppermost Norian Stage. However, the Subcommission on Triassic Stratigraphy has recommended retaining its usage as a Triassic stage, and their recommendation has been followed in this article.