Sequence stratigraphy and the world sea-level curve: The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science awarded to Peter R. Vail

Abstract

During the mid-1960s, Peter R. Vail at Exxon Production Research Co. led a group working with the new, greatly improved generation of multifold seismic reflection data being shot along the continental margins of the world. The work of this group, inspired by Vail, brought the worlds of stratigraphy and seismic interpretation together in developing the original concepts of seismic stratigraphy. Later these concepts were applied by Vail and his co-workers to well logs, cores, and outcrops, broadening seismic stratigraphy into what is known today as sequence stratigraphy. Using these data the group was documenting and interpreting large-scale, basin-wide depositional patterns, stratal configurations, and unconformities in basins around the world. They proposed a chronology of global sea-level fluctuation as a framework for global correlation, resulting in a world sea-level curve. This further led to a new eustatic sea-level model. The results of these studies impacted on many scientific disciplines, but its implications for the petroleum industry have been extensive. A review of 19th- and 20th-Century stratigraphic thought on unconformities and unconformity-bounded stratal units suggests that Peter Vail followed in the footsteps of the eminent stratigraphers Charles Lyell, T. C. Chamberlain, and L. L. Sloss, his former teacher. For his contributions to sequence stratigraphy and the world sea-level curve, Peter R. Vail was awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science.