Tectono-stratigraphic evolution of the Mamfe sedimentary basin, Southwestern Cameroon

The Mamfe sedimentary basin, located in the southwestern region of Cameroon, is one of various extensions of the Benue Trough that covers regions in Nigeria and Cameroon. It is a rifting basin formed in response to the Gondwana break‐up and subsequent separation of the later South American and African plate during early Cretaceous (Olade, 1975). It covers an area as large as 2400 km², extending in an NW‐SE trending trough with a length of 130 km and width of 60 km. The basin constitutes a narrow extension of the lower part of Benue Trough where important oil fields have been discovered (Adebayo et al., 2016).

The age of deposits as published in the literature ranges from early to late Cretaceous, mostly because current dating does not cover the whole basin due to lack of paleontological data and scarcity of good outcrop exposures in this rainy region. The provenance of Mamfe sedimentary basin infill, in particular if deposits were exclusively continental, remains also poorly explored, as does the timing and spatial distribution of depositional history.

The present study addresses some of these issues, in particular the understanding of depositional environment using sedimentology along with XRF and LA-ICP-MS geochemical analyses. The study further intends to evaluate the hydrocarbon potential based on organic geochemistry including Rock‐Eval and to date the sediments trough palynological analysis.