Clay mineralogy of sediments of the western Nile Delta

Abstract Investigation of the clay mineralogy of forty-seven samples of sediments from boreholes in the western Nile Delta, an area little studied hitherto, and from surface sites on the mouth of the Nile and adjacent coast shows that the clay fractions consist of dominant iron-rich, dioctahedral, randomly interstratified smectite-illitcs together with kaolinite, illite and chlorite. Amounts of the constituent minerals of the clay fractions are estimated from their X-ray diffraction intensities, supported by selective dissolution chemical data, and a new method is used to estimate the proportion of expanding layers in randomly interstratified smectite-illite. The results, which confirm and extend the work of previous investigators, also show that there is little correlation between the clay mineral composition and texture of the sediments, only kaolinite being weakly linearly correlated with clay content. Transformation of 2:1 layer silicate minerals occurs within the buried sediments ; chlorite is transformed and smectite and illite interlayers redistributed within randomly interstratified smectite-illites.