Hydrocarbon reservoirs in glaciogenic sediments? – The Late Ordovician (Hirnantian) succession of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula

Since the middle of the 20 th century, the origin of the Hirnantian deposits of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have been interpreted as evidence of large-scale glaciation. In spite of this long held interpretation, a summary of documented data from this area indicates no evidence of full scale glaciation, but rather a more spasmodic or catastrophic origin of the geologic features, possible with outflow of subsurface water similar to what has been interpreted at our neighbour planet Mars. The evidence is of massive flows of water and sediment gravity flows (SGFs) connected to tectonics. The origin and transport of hydrocarbons in the area may be spasmodic, and there is no evidence of connection to continental-wide glaciation. A Diamict origin table is used to sum up the evidence of geologic features which have been interpreted to be from glaciation, and if these are better explained by glaciation or other geological processes. • Simplification hypothesis is validated by a multilingual interpreting corpus. • Three interpreting variants show lower entropy than L1 English. • Degrees of simplification vary across different source languages.