A Geochemical Approach to the Palaeo Coastline Reconstruction in southern Khuzestan Plain

Several studies had been tried to illustrate the paleo coastlines of the Persian Gulf during the Holocene. A review of those researches reflects the fact that all of them have stablished their facts based on the sedimentary environment interpretations with no quantitative evidence. Generally, the study area is a changing environment which is a combination of riverine, continental, coastal and evaporative environments together with several pounds, marshes and other kinds of seasonal wetlands. Those environments are in direct contact and most of interacted boundary water bodies are fed by both available sources of water, saline sea water and inland fresh water. Boundary strips are wide and extend up to 50 kilometers to the hinterland. Wherein, drawing any simple district line for separation of the two major environments of marine and continental is hard, even at the modern era. This study is an effort for recruiting geochemical proxies as a numeric data in order to support sedimentary interpretations obtained from 27 bore holes with the maximum depth of 11 meters and totally 370 meters over the southern plain. The results showed that multivariable statistics analysis in conjunction with the sedimentary evidence were better data sets for paleo environment coastlines reconstruction.