The Ordovician System in the Levant region (Middle East) and southern Turkey: review of depositional facies, fauna and stratigraphy

Abstract This contribution addresses the current state of knowledge of the mainly siliciclastic Ordovician rocks in Jordan, Syria and southern Turkey, including advances in palaeontology, stratigraphy, depositional facies analysis and supra-regional correlation. The extensive and excellent exposures of the sedimentary succession in southern Jordan represent the regional reference for the Ordovician System in the southern Levant. We discuss the sedimentological and faunal characteristics as well as the stratigraphy and correlation of the succession. For the northern Levant (especially southeastern Turkey) and the western and eastern Taurides, the Ordovician succession and an updated sedimentary architecture is explained, and a comprehensive correlation for the region is presented. Increased knowledge on the fossil content from these regions enables correlation across the southern parts of the Arabian Plate to southern Turkey, and with the greater Gondwanan regions, far field as southwestern Europe and northern Africa. The depositional environments in the southern and northern Levant and southern Turkey encompass non-marine to shallow-marine areas in the lower part of the Ordovician that are followed upsection by shelf deposits of variable proximity up to the glacial episode in the Late Ordovician that is traceable in each of the areas. Characteristic signals in the Ordovician succession are represented by the trans-regional early Darriwilian unconformity and by the base of the Hirnantian glacial-related deposits followed by lower Silurian strata, visible across the entire region. New data from zircon-based provenance analysis clearly implicate the Arabian Shield as the main source of a huge amount of the clastic detritus within the Ordovician succession. In the course of the entire Cambrian–Ordovician interval, progressive deeper erosion of the Arabian Shield occurred. Sediment sources from regions farther away indicate long time of exposure and resedimentation, and some long-distance transportation, but their sedimentary influence was only of minor extent. The excellent outcrops mainly in southern Jordan, in southeastern Turkey and in the Taurides represent potential regions for further research.