The Maikop series is a regional stratigraphic element, a common name for marine sediments of the Oligocene- Lower Miocene age, adopted in the territory from the Western Black Sea to the Eastern Ciscaucasia . But deposits of this age and genesis are traced somewhat more widely - from the Carpathians to the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan.
Description
It was first isolated and described by N.I. Andrusov in the Crimea . It consists of sandy-clayey rocks, mostly not limestone , with a thickness of several tens to 4000 m. The greatest thickness is characteristic of the northern Ciscaucasia and Taman. As a rule, it lies with a stratigraphic break at different age formations, from metamorphic schists and gneisses of the Proterozoic basement of the East European platform to marls of the Middle Eocene . The value of erosion embedding varies from the first meters to 2 km.
The rocks of the Maykop series are oil source. The first industrial oil deposits of the Caucasus were discovered in the strip between Khadyzhensky and Absheron (present-day Krasnodar Territory) and are located in the deposits of the Maykop series. In addition, the Maykop series is known for large manganese deposits (Nikopol in Ukraine and Chiatur in Georgia). These deposits are associated with the lenses of shallow sandy-silt deposits of the Oligocene-Lower Miocene. Small manifestations of manganese ores are known in the same deposits of the Maykop series in the North Caucasus and coeval deposits of the eastern slope of the Urals. A unique feature of the Maykop series is the presence in its clay differences of manifestations and deposits of rare-earth elements and uranium (the largest of which is the Cretaceous uranium deposit on the Mangyshlak Peninsula). Both REE and uranium are associated with large deposits of so-called "bone breccia" - accumulations of fragments of fish bones and marine animals. The length of these deposits reaches 10 km.
References and Sources
- Mining Encyclopedic Dictionary, 2004