Deep Marine Systems Processes, Deposits, Environments, Tectonics and Sedimentation

About this book

Deep-water (below wave base) processes, although generally hidden from view, shape the sedimentary record of more than 65% of the Earth's surface, including large parts of ancient mountain belts. Deep Marine Systems aims to inform advanced-level undergraduate and postgraduate students, and professional Earth scientists with interests in physical oceanography and hydrocarbon exploration and production, about many of the important physical aspects of deep-water (mainly deep-marine) systems. The authors consider transport and deposition in the deep sea, trace-fossil assemblages, and facies stacking patterns as an archive of the underlying controls on deposit architecture (e.g., seismicity, climate change, autocyclicity). Topics include modern and ancient deep-water sedimentary environments, tectonic settings, and how basinal and extra-basinal processes generate the typical characteristics of basin slopes, submarine canyons, contourite mounds and drifts, submarine fans, basin floors and abyssal plains.

Contents

Preface

Part I: Process and Product
Chapter 1: Physical and biological processes
Chapter 2: Sediments (facies)
Chapter 3: Deep-water ichnology (contributed by Thomas Heard)
Chapter 4: Time-space integration
Chapter 5: Statistical properties of sediment gravity flow (SGF) deposits

Part II: Systems
Chapter 6: Sediment drifts and abyssal sediment waves
Chapter 7: Submarine fans and related depositional systems: Modern
Chapter 8: Submarine fans and related depositional systems: Ancient

Part III: Plate tectonics and sedimentation
Chapter 9: Evolving and mature extensional systems
Chapter 10: Subduction margins
Chapter 11: Foreland basins
Chapter 12: Strike-slip continental margin basins

References
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Kevin T. Pickering is Professor of Sedimentology & Stratigraphy in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London, U.K. He has published ~140 peer-reviewed papers, co-authored 6 books and edited 3 books on aspects of deep-water sediments and global environmental issues. He managed the industry-sponsored Ainsa Project, an integrated outcrop-subsurface drilling project to understand deep-marine channels in the Spanish Pyrenees, and has sailed on four international scientific drilling expeditions (DSDP, ODP, IODP). In 2010, in recognition of his research, Pickering was elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

Richard N. Hiscott is an Emeritus Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.  His 40 years of process-oriented research covers ancient deep-sea to alluvial facies of Proterozoic to Cretaceous age, four Ocean Drilling Program campaigns including Amazon submarine fan, Quaternary sedimentology of the Labrador Sea, Santa Monica Basin, and the Black Sea region including dynamics of the saline gravity current that enters the low-salinity Black Sea through the Bosphorus Strait.