Is the Postglacial History of the Baltic Sea an Appropriate Analogue for the Formation of Black Shales in the Lower Ecca Group (Early Permian) of the Karoo Basin, South Africa?

Marine flooding surfaces recorded in Permian black shales and coal deposits of the Main Karoo Basin (South Africa): Implications for basin dynamics and cross-basin correlation

“…In contrast to the continuous marine depositional environment for the Prince Albert, Whitehill and basal Collingham formations and major flooding phases recorded in contemporaneous coal deposits favoured here, Schulz et al (2016) proposed a basin model that includes stratified water bodies comprising anoxic bottom waters overlain by less dense sub-saline waters with high bioproductivity.…”

“…Previous works on Permian Karoo black shales provide sedimentological and palaeontological evidence for their marine origin (e.g., Haughton et al, 1953;du Toit, 1954;Rilett, 1963;Hart, 1964Hart, , 1969Hart, , 1970Ryan, 1968;McLachlan and Anderson, 1973;Teichert and Rilett, 1974;Stanistreet et al, 1980;Oelofsen, 1987;Visser, 1987Visser, , 1989Visser, , 1992Visser, , 1993Visser, , 1994Visser and Young, 1990;Smith et al, 1993;Johnson et al, 1997Johnson et al, , 2006Scheffler et al, 2006;Buatois et al, 2010;Götz, 2015). Despite this, there is ongoing controversy and discussion concerning the marine or lacustrine origin in the context of the postglacial development of the Karoo Basin (e.g., Cole and McLachlan, 1991;Faure and Cole, 1999;Herbert & Compton, 2007;Chukwuma and Bordy, 2016;Schulz et al, 2016). This discussion includes the palaeoecology of the famous Permian mesosaurs (Oelofsen, 1981;Oelofsen and Araújo, 1983), interpretations ranging from freshwater, brackish, coastal, lagoonal, hypersaline to normal marine (see Modesto, 2006;Piñeiro et al, 2012;Silva et al, 2017 and references therein).…”