Advances in nanotechnology over the past decade have made scanning electron microscopy (SEM) an indispensable and powerful tool for analyzing and constructing new nanomaterials. Development of nanomaterials requires advanced techniques and skills to attain higher quality images, understand nanostructures, and improve synthesis strategies.

Come with me to the American Museum of Natural History on New York City's Central Park West. We walk up the broad stairs, dominated by the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States and a great benefactor of the museum. We enter the great Roosevelt Rotunda, where we are awed by one of the most dramatic dinosaur exhibits in the world —the mounted skeletons of a mother Barosaurus protecting her young one from an attacking carnivorous Allosaurus.

In October 1985, SEPM sponsored a four-day conference entitled "Sea-Level Changes—An Integrated Approach." The conference was organized by Everest Geotech, Inc., and hosted by Transco Exploration Company in Houston, Texas. Co-conveners of the conference were Dr. Cheryl Wilgus of Everest Geotech, Inc., Dr. Walter C. Pitman of Lamont-Dougherty Oceanographic Institute, and Dr. Christopher G. St. C. Kendall of the University of South Carolina.

Various simple and advanced models exist for mechanisms of uniform and non-uniform sediment compaction that increases density and reduces porosity. While the classical Athy’s relation on depth-wise exponential reduction of porosity is not divided into any distinct stages, the Hedberg’s model involves four stages. Weller’s model utilized Athy’s and Hedberg’s relations to deduce a sediment compaction model. Power’s compaction model additionally considers clay mineralogy. Several other porosity/compaction models exist, e.g., those by Teodorovich and Chernov, Burst, Beall, and Overton and Zanier. The geometry of the depth-wise porosity profile depends on the sedimentation rate, compaction mechanism and pressure solution model. This chapter reviews porosity variation with depth for the following rock types: shales, shaly sandstones, sandstones and carbonates. <...>