Bulletin of the Geological Society of Malaysia, Volume 74, November 2022, pp. 69 – 83
Field and well evidence for major unconformities in north Sarawak, compared to southwest Sabah, Malaysia
Peter Lunt
SEACARL, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610 Seri Iskandar, Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia
Stratos Energy Advisors, 128D, Jalan Damai, off Jalan Ampang, 55000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Author email address: pl@stratos-sea.com
Abstract: A review of biostratigraphic and lithofacies data is used to show that there is no major unconformity in the stratigraphic record of north Sarawak or southwest Sabah near the end of the Early Miocene (approximately 17-15 Ma). The existence of such an unconformity has been cited in many papers in the past decade and used as a data point in the construction of regional geological hypotheses. Exploration well and outcrop data identifies two major unconformities in SW Sabah (the base and top of Stage III; BMU and DRU; roughly 24 and 13-12 Ma), and in offshore west Sarawak a third unconformity (MMU c. 16 Ma) which fades in effect towards onshore Sarawak. In recent years the names of these distinct unconformities have become conflated as workers had overlooked the origins and definitions of these features. This history is reviewed here in order to clarify future work.
Keywords: Sarawak, Sabah, stratigraphy, unconformities
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Manuscript received 21 March 2022
Received in revised form 28 August 2022
Accepted 5 September 2022
Available online 30 November 2022
0126-6187; 2637-109X / Published by the Geological Society of Malaysia.
© 2022 by the Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License 4.0.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7186/bgsm74202205
