Behold the power of the microcomputer before your very eyes! This book took less than a year to complete from the initial conversations between Dan Merriam and myself to final typeset copy. This would have been impossible when the first volume of this book was published. All of the papers in this volume, with one exception, arrived on floppy disk but in four different disk formats and many wordprocessing formats. These were all handled elegantly by our typesetter and converted into the appropriate Macintosh file format. Even some of the figures were placed in the book electronically. I see this as a great boon to the world of science because of the much shorter time between inception and dispersal of scientific knowledge. As a result of using microcomputers to typeset this book, the information contained in it is current and fresh. <...>

The objective of this book is to provide a synthesis of the methods used in microfacies studies of carbonate rocks and to show how the application of microfacies studies has contributed to new developments in carbonate geology. In contrast with other textbooks on carbonate sedimentology this book focuses on those compositional and textural constituents of carbonates that reflect the depositional and diagenetic history and determine the practical usefulness of carbonate rocks.

Results are presented of a high-resolution study of foraminifers, ostracods and marine palynomorphs from the continuous succession of Middle Volgian – Lower Valanginian (Upper Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous) deposits of the Nordvik section (NE Siberia). Six foraminiferal and six dinoflagellate cyst (dinocyst) zones and subzones have been identified. Volgian foraminiferal assemblages (Dorothia tortuosa JF51 zone and Ammodiscus veteranus, Evolutinella emeljanzevi JF52 zone) may be regarded as correlative markers for Arctic regions as they are also observed in Barents Sea shelf sediments and different regions of Siberia. Marine palynomorph assemblages provide a reliable correlation with northern areas of Western Europe and Canada at three stratigraphic levels: (a) the base of the Upper Volgian, (b) the middle of the Berriasian and (c) the lowermost Valanginian.

Studies on the properties and behaviour of clay soils, conducted in Soil Engineering, have revealed the importance of Soil Structure in the control of the properties and response performance of clays. Early descriptions of clay soil structure, in the 1950s–1960s, using such terms as ‘honeycomb’, ‘cardhouse’, ‘flocculated’, ‘dispersed’ and ‘oriented’ testify to the level of descriptive scrutiny of the micromorphology of clay soils.