The nature and origin of sideritic ironstone bands in the tertiary lowmead and duaringa basins, Queensland

Sideritic ironstones in Tertiary lacustrine oil shale from the Lowmead and Duaringa Basins in Queensland, contain two distinctive types of siderite in the ironstone bands: sphaerosiderite in the mudstone and coal, and finely crystalline siderite in the lamosite. The petrological evidence indicates that the siderite in the ironstone bands formed eogenetically by growing displacively within the soft sediment. Chemically the siderite is very pure though the sphaerosiderite sometimes shows compositional zoning. Stable oxygen and carbon isotope analyses of the siderite show a wide range of values from ‐12.8‰ to ‐2.4 %_>0> δ¹⁸O (PDB) and ‐5.5‰ to +12.9‰ δ¹³C (PDB) for the Lowmead Basin; and ‐9.6‰ to ‐1.2‰ δ¹⁸O (PDB) and ‐18.6‰ to +16.4‰ δ¹³C (PDB) for the Duaringa Basin. The oxygen isotope data indicate that the siderite formed in freshwater environments but not in isotopic equilibrium with the formation waters. Kinetic factors offer the most plausible explanation for the anomalously light δ¹⁸O values of many of the siderites. The carbon isotope data show that the carbonate for the formation of the siderite originated predominantly from methanogenic fermentation processes but there was also the varying influence of bacterial oxidation processes. The different petrological and isotopic characteristics of the ironstones broadly reflect variations in their depositional environments and the variable eogenetic conditions in which the siderite formed. There is no suitable single model to explain the genesis of all the different types of ironstones other than that a synsedimentary iron‐enrichment process is involved.