Late Quaternary Stratigraphic Evolution of the Northern Gulf of Mexico Margin, SEPM Special Publication No. 79

Abstract

John B. Anderson and Richard H. Fillon (Eds.), 2004, SEPM, Tulsa, USA, 314 p. (Hardcover, US $135.00 non-members, US $97.00 members, US $68.00 student members) ISBN 1-56576-088-3. Sequence stratigraphy has advanced significantly over the past few decades. It is not that the fundamental concepts have changed— namely that periodic variations in the ratio of accommodation to sediment supply over time shift sedimentation basinward or landward, producing systematic facies trends between regional stratigraphic discontinuities. Rather, it is that our understanding of how depositional systems respond to larger-scale controls has become more sophisticated. Two-dimensional models of sequence development may be a good introduction for those starting out, but they fail to capture the importance of spatial shifts in the locus of deposition and erosion and the evolution of depositional environments that really control stratal geometries and the distribution of facies within the stratigraphic record. Within stratigraphic successions, there generally is a complex hierarchy of depositional variations produced by a variety of autocyclic and allocyclic controls. Stratigraphy reflects not just the regression and transgression of shorelines, but also changes in depositional processes and patterns of facies preservation within systems tracts, development of a range of discontinuities formed in areas of both local and regional sediment bypass or starvation, and the expansion of deposition during progradation onto shelves or confinement of deposition and sediment transport pathways by surface topography, spatially varying subsidence rates, or development of shoreline embayments during shoreline retreat. It is increasingly recognized that most vertical successions of strata record only brief fragments of geologic history; to read the entire record, one must understand how to follow the history of deposition spatially across the system. The authors who contributed to this SEPM special publication set an ambitious agenda: to document and interpret controlling processes of sequence architecture and internal facies across the …