Deep marine systems: processes, deposits, environments, tectonics and sedimentation / Глубоководные системы: процессы, отложение, среда, тектоника и осадконакопление

It is now 25 years since, along with Francis Hein as a co-author, we published Deep Marine Environments: Clastic Sedimentation and Tectonics with Unwin-Hyman (Pickering et al. 1989). During this time, there have been enormous advances in our understanding of modern and ancient deep-water environments, the physical processes that operate and the resulting deposits. Technology has allowed a much greater interrogation of deep-water environments, for example through improvements in the use of side-scan sonar, the acquisition and processing of seismic-reflection data, together with considerable advances in both industrial and academic deep-water drilling. Experimental, theoretical and observational studies have led to a significantly improved understanding of the fluid dynamics and depositional processes in deep-water settings.

A greater understanding of the architectural elements that form the building blocks of deep-water systems, and the application of sequence stratigraphy to such deposits, have all led to an appreciation of the dynamic nature of sedimentation in response to allocyclic (extra-basinal) and autocyclic (intra-basinal) controls, such as changes in local, regional or global relative base level (eustatic, tectonic, etc.). Experimental modelling of strata! geometry is increasingly used in an attempt to constrain the range of what is physically possible (e.g., using large flume tanks such as EUROTANK based at Utrecht University, The Netherlands; St Anthony Falls Laborntory, University of Minesota/USGS; the STEP Basin, University of Texas at Austin). Research in the past two decades has led to a greater understanding of the actual or potential importance of climate change and weather patterns at a whole range of temporal scales in driving environmental change and deep-water deposition, for example Milankovitch cyclicity, sunspot cycles, extreme weather, and  non-linear ocean-atmosphere dynamics (cf Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events). Many of these processes still remain relatively poorly understood, but they are increasingly being invoked as possible explanations for stratigraphic patterns observed in deep-water sedimentary environments. The possible importance of internal tides in the ocean as a process in sediment transport and deposition was not even considered when we wrote our first book. These are just some of the recent major advances in deep-water sedimentology that make this book very different to the 1989 book.

It is, however, beyond the scope of this current book to consider the physics of such processes. Instead, we discuss how they may explain physical observations from deep-water successions.<...>