Abstract
Paleocurrents are sedimentological features contained in all sedimentary deposits, enabling the direction of movement of the sediment and the containing fluid at the time of deposition to be determined. This database contains paleocurrent directions and other relevant associated data from published sources and theses and dissertations for the entire Phanerozoic and Precambrian for all continents. Such information may be of general interest to sedimentologists and will be of specific interest in sedimentary basin analysis, and to petroleum geologists and mineralogists seeking source areas. Paleocurrents may also be useful in plate reconstructions and in testing the timing of global tectonic events.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThe history of interest in paleocurrents goes back to the middle 1800s, but serious work on them began in the 1960’s
Potter and Pettijohn’s classic work[1], published first in 1963, framed the rapid expansion of interest in paleocurrents seen in the geological literature, as sedimentologists and petroleum geologists recognized the usefulness of paleocurrents for establishing provenance and defining sedimentary basins
As used here, dataset refers to a single depiction of paleocurrent data in a paper, including the results of one or more outcrop determinations of paleocurrent direction, and would be represented by a single entry in the database
Summary
The history of interest in paleocurrents goes back to the middle 1800s, but serious work on them began in the 1960’s. The results encouraged us to continue the study This pursuit was stimulated by the textbook authors’ challenge: ‘An aspect of paleocurrents, still far from being exploited, is compilation of more region-wide paleocurrent and facies maps... Paleocurrents, along with other kinds of data have contributed to defining basinal geometry[12] and basinal processes[13] They have directed in the exploration for placer deposits[14] and petroleum reservoirs[15,16]. By the mid 1990s we had exhausted the readily available published records, but we found a new resource in geological theses and dissertations which often contained abundant data that were not published elsewhere. A graduate student, Mingmin Wang joined our project in 2011 to help us read and interpret these papers She continued to work with us on other areas as well.
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