Arkell.1956.Jurassic..

CHAPTER 13
THE RANGES OF SOUTH-WEST ASIA
ASIA MINOR (ANATOLIA)
Throughout the mountainous peninsula, 900 miles long by 400 miles
wide, that comprises Asia Minor, the sedimentary records of the Jurassic
transgression are unusually imperfect and scattered. So great has been
the erosion that, as in the Highlands of Scotland, it is no longer possible
to determine whether the absence of Jurassic rocks over hundreds of square
miles is due to non-deposition or to wholesale removal by denudation.
The sediments covered the eroded remnants of a late-Palaeozoic orogeny
and then were caught up in the mid-Tertiary orogeny with intense folding
and overthrusting, more than usually complicated by posthumous reactivation
of the older structures. There is evidence that at least in the SW.
of the peninsula Upper Jurassic and Cretaceous limestones of two different
facies, deposited a considerable distance apart, have been brought together
by thrusting.
After Permian erosion of the late-Palaeozoic mountains, the Mesozoic
transgression began in the north-west, in some places with the Lower Trias
and in others with the Middle or Upper Trias, while in the central regions
it began with the Lower Lias. In the SE. of the peninsula the earliest
sediments seem to be Cretaceous, consisting of a featureless and poorly
fossiliferous mass of limestones. It is likely that the main chains of the
Taurus, like the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas, were never submerged during
the Jurassic. The Lias to the north of this barrier is typical of the Tethys,
showing many palaeontological links with the Mediterranean and Alpine
regions and Carpathians, but the Lias and Bajocian to the south, in Syria
and Arabia, belong to a different province. In the Callovian and Oxfordian
the barrier began to break down in the east, letting typical European
ammonite faunas spread over Arabia, Syria, Sinai and East Africa. These
faunas did not come direct from the Balkans but rather from the northeast,
across the Caucasus and northern Persia from South Russia.
The survival of mountains undergoing rapid erosion in south-central
Anatolia during the Jurassic is to be inferred from the presence of Jurassic
flysch adjoining the SW. coast round the head of the Bay of Antalya
(Adalia). Both west and east of this is a great development of almost
unfossiliferous limestones, a 'comprehensive series', 2500 m. thick, in
which Toarcian ammonites are reported, but which ranges up from the
Jurassic to the Eocene inclusive, without a break (Blumenthal, 1945, p. 110;
Tromp, 1941, 1947)- Farther east, in SE. Anatolia, the Hercynian ranges
were not submerged until the Upper Cretaceous; the first Mesozoic
marine beds to overstep the folded Carboniferous are radiolarites of
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