The upland ‘Red Beds’ from the Khanapur Figureau, Maharashtra, India

The basalt flows are unconformably overlain by a thick sequence of reddish-brown colored sediments of Paleocene (?) age. The upper part of the ‘red beds’ have been highly calcretized, show the presence of powder, nodular, honeycomb, platy, tabular, and hardpan calcrete varieties. The ‘red beds’ are detrital in nature, poorly sorted, heterogeneous in lithological composition show dominance of reddish-brown colored silts and clays basaltic fragments and ferric oxide nodules. The ‘red beds’ developed badland topography, constitute typical alluvial fan-like deposits, and show a variety of primary sedimentary structures. On the basic of color, texture, sedimentary structures, ‘red beds’ have been grouped into the category of colluviofluvially transported detrital. The heavy minerals of the ‘red beds’ dominated by magnetite, ilmenite, rutile, apatite, monazite, and perovskite occur in subordinate amount. Microscopically, the minerals grains indicate their nature of transportation. The clay and related mineral assemblages as obtained with help of XRD and IR are kaolinite, huntite, nontronite, quartz, fireclay, magnesite, hematite, goethite, calcite, hallyosite, dolomite and organic matter, it is evident that the ‘red beds’ do not show any profile differentiation. From the chemistry of the ‘red beds’ do not present any systematic chemical variation with depth, this indicates thatthe genesis of ‘red beds’ is not related to a pedogenic processes.