ABSTRACT
Most of southwest Egypt is a cuesta type landscape of Late Jurassic to Cretaceous elastics, of small to medium high escarpments with extensive sand and gravel sheets situated between them. From the north, this area is entered by large longitudinal dunes of the great western sandsea which forms a closed sandmass north of the Ammonite Hills. Early information on the geology of the southwestern desert of Egypt came mainly from four expeditions. During the Rohlfs expediton in 1872-1873, basic information about the marine strata overlying the so-called Nubian Sandstone was gathered and a first geological map of large parts of the Western Desert was published. At the southeastern edge of this mountain area, at Karkur Murr, Carboniferous strata rest directly on the Precambrian basement. The upper half to one-third of the Gilf Kebir Plateau is made up of younger Cretaceous strata equivalent to the Sabaya Formation and to the Maghrabi Formation.
