About this Book

Preface

There are numerous books about sedimentary rocks and stratigraphy, but their contents are often locked down by vague or restrictive copyright and not easily used for teaching, coursepacks, etc. This creates a real problem for educators. We found the following resources particularly inspirational and tried our best to emulate them in this single open access resource:

• The comprehensive and organized photographs in Dorrik Stow's 2005 book "Sedimentary Rocks in the Field - A Color Guide", Usable and comprehensive photograph collections by Mark Wilson (Wikimedia Commons) and James St. John (Flickr).  We also have to give a nod to photographs at the intersection of art and science by Jessica Martin (@jmgeophoto) and Franco Ricci Lucchi's 1995 book "Sedimentographica: A photographic atlas of Sedimentary Structures"
• The elegant hand drafted diagrams in Robert Folk's 1968 coursepack for UT Austin "Petrology of Sedimentary Rocks" and Chelsea Feeney's illustrations in Hyndman and Thomas' 2020 (2nd ed.) book "Roadside Geology of Montana"
• The straightforward explanations and diagrams on Lynn Fichter's webpages (much of which was published in Fichter and Pouche's 1993 book "Ancient Environments and the Interpretation of Geologic History" and Brian Rickett's Geological Digressions webpage.
• The paired photomicrographs and descriptions of sedimentary rocks, fossils, and minerals in Scholle and Ulmer-Scholle's 2003 book "A color guide to the petrography of carbonate rocks" and Adam's et al.'s 1984 book "Atlas of sedimentary rocks under the microscope"

Book Organization

Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of why sedimentary rocks are important. The rest of the book is organized around three major themes:

Origin, description, and interpretation of sedimentary rocks (Chapters 2-8)

In this part of the book we discuss sediment ... where it comes from, how it moves, how to describe it, and how we can use our understanding of sediment and sedimentary rocks to tell us about processes. Labs accompanying this content will focus on hands on skills including how to use a petrographic microscope, how to identify common sedimentary structures, and how to quantitatively and qualitatively describe both rock and unconsolidated sediment.

Fossils and Depositional environments (Chapters 9-10)

Armed with the descriptive language and basic interpretive ability gained in Chapters 2-8, the second portion of the book focuses on using that knowledge to study environments. Once we know what we are looking at and have an understanding of the processes responsible for creating that material, we can move on to a more advanced stage of interpretation: figuring out depositional processes and environments. As Charles Lyell said, “the present is the key to the past” and we will take a tour of modern environments and then think about what they might look like if preserved in the geologic record. Practical skills in associated labs include include facies analysis, linking processes to environments, and core description and analysis.

Sea Level and Stratigraphy (Chapters 11-12)

In the final portion of the book we will gain an understanding of the spatial and temporal relationships between units, learn how to lump packages of rock together based on genetic relationships, lithologic similarity, fossil content, and/or age. You’ll want to have your colored pencils sharpened because the associated labs have numerous correlation exercises and cross sections!

About the Authors

Dr. Michael Rygel holds a B.S. in Geology and Planetary Science from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, a Ph.D. from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia), was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is a Professional Geologist (licensed in NYS). He is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at SUNY Potsdam and teaches courses on Earth history, sedimentary geology, structural geology, GIS, and introductory courses. He worked as a consultant for Devon Energy from 2011-2013 and spends his summers (since 2011) co-teaching Indiana University's "Field Geology in the Northern Rocky Mountains" (X429) course. He is a Past-President of the New York State Council of Professional Geologists and served as an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences and the Journal of Sedimentary Research.

He has deep ties to the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania and his research focuses on understanding the Paleozoic-aged rocks that these industries were built on. Specifically, he is a sedimentologist and stratigrapher that specializes in understanding ancient environments. Past research projects have focused on outcrops in the coal-bearing rocks in the Appalachian Basin (PA-WV) and Maritimes Basin (Atlantic Canada) as well as coeval ancient glacial deposits in southeastern Australia. His current research focuses on the sedimentology and stratigraphy of Late Paleozoic carbonates in Montana, west Texas, and New Mexico.

Dr. Page Quinton holds a B.S. in Geology from Columbus State University and M.S. and Ph.D degrees from the The University of Missouri. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at SUNY Potsdam and teaches courses in Earth history, geochemistry, paleontology, scientific writing, and a variety of introductory courses. She serves as the STEM Coordinator at SUNY Potsdam and facilitates hundreds of K-12 students visiting the SUNY Potsdam campus every year. Since 2016 she has co-taught Indiana University's "Field Geology in the Northern Rocky Mountains" (X429) course.

She is a stable isotope geochemist that studies the connection between the carbon cycle, ancient climate change, and major mass extinction events. Recent work has included research focusing on the role of climate change in the Dinosaur Mass Extinction Event, understanding the impact of early land plants on shallow seas, and understanding the connection between sea level change and carbon cycling. This work has taken her to Australia, Canada, all over the US (Montana, New Mexico, Texas, and numerous other locations).

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by NSF Grant #2042276 to Quinton and Rygel and sabbaticals granted by SUNY Potsdam.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Carbonate World webpage: https://carbonateworld.com/
• SEPM's stratigraphy webpage - http://www.sepmstrata.org/page.aspx?pageid=1
• Sedimentary Rocks entry on the Geology is the Way webpage: https://geologyistheway.com/sedimentary/
• Alek Strekeisen's webpage entries dedicated to sedimentary rocks: https://www.alexstrekeisen.it/english/sedi/index.php