Stratigraphy: A modern synthesis / Стратиграфия: современный синтез

The stratigraphic record is the major repository of information about the geological history of Earth, a record stretching back for nearly 4 billion years. Stratigraphic studies fill out our planet’s plate-tectonic history with the details of paleogeography, past climates and the record of evolution, and stratigraphy is at the heart of the effort to find and exploit fossil fuel resources.
The exploration of this history has been underway since James Hutton first established the basic idea of uniformitarianism toward the end of the eighteenth century, and William Smith developed the stratigraphic basis for geological mapping a few decades later. Modern stratigraphic methods are now able to provide insights into past geological events and processes on time scales with unprecedented accuracy and precision, and have added much to our understanding of global tectonic and climatic processes. But it has taken 200 years and a modern revolution to bring all the necessary developments together to create the modern, dynamic science that this book sets out to describe. It has been a slow revolution, but stratigraphy now consists of a suite of integrated concepts and methods, several of which have considerable predictive and interpretive power. <...>