Abstract:
The area north of Salt Range is called Potwar Plateau due to its relatively constant elevation and it encompasses most of the drainage area of the Soan River. Potwar is located in the western foothills of Himalayas in northern Pakistan. It includes the Potwar Plateau, the Salt Range, and the Jhelum Plain. It extends about 130 km from the Main Boundary Thrust (MBT) in the north and is bounded in the east by Jhelum strike-slip fault, in the west by Kalabagh strike-slip fault, in the north by the MBT and in the south by the Salt Range Thrust. Potwar Sub-basin is filled with thick Pre-Cambrian evaporites overlain by relatively thin platform deposits of Cambrian to Eocene followed by thick Miocene–Pliocene molasse. This whole section has been severely deformed by extremely intensive Himalayan orogeny in Pliocene to Middle Pleistocene times.
Subsurface geometry proposed for the Potwar sub-basin along seismic transects and their geological transposition exhibit distinct domains from south to north and in the eastern and western parts of the basin, which in turn may be associated with the density and occurrence of effective fracture systems in various reservoirs, particularly Eocene carbonates
