Nearshore Coastal Sedimentation in the Early Cretaceous Ranipat Formation of Saurashtra Basin, Gujarat, Western India

The Early Cretaceous Ranipat Formation of Saurashtra basin is divisible into three distinct lithofacies assemblages: 1) crossbedded sandstone facies assemblage characterised by coatse to medium-grained, planar and trough crossbedded sandstone with occasional thin layers of silty mud or reactivation surfaces; 2) plane-bedded sandstone facies assemblage composed of interbedded white to clean white, medium to fine-grained sandstone, siltstone and shale with a low-diversity of shallow water trace fossils; and 3) thin-bedded sandstone and mudstone facies assemblage characterised by interbedded fine to very fine-grained sandstone, small scale planar and trough crossbedding, horizontally bedded, ripple cross-laminated, way and lenticular bedding, flaser and herringbone crossbedding with the dominant ichnogenera being Skolitbos and Ophiomorpha. These lilhofacies assemblages indicate that the Ranipat sandstone was deposited in a tidal, intertidal, and shallow subtidal shoreline environment. The mineralogy, texture, and paleocurrent data also rcveal that the sediments were brought to the Ranipat basin, largely by southwesterly streams/distributaries, with occasional dispersal and redistribution by northwesterly to northerly oriented longshore and/or tidal currents of the nearby coastal environment.