Chapter 10 DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS PART I: GENERAL

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Chapter 10 DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS PART I: GENERAL 1. INTRODUCTION What does a sedimentologist mean by environment of deposition? The concept is not as easy to define as you might think. Basically, what the conditions were at the site of deposition. This is usually viewed in terms of an overall geographical complex or entity that has a characteristic set of conditions, like a river or a beach but see below. The term environment is really used in two different ways: THE environment: the aggregate or complex of physical and/or chemical and/or biological conditions that exist or prevail at a given point or in a given local area at a given time or for a period of time. AN environment: a distinctive kind of geographic setting characterized by a distinctive set of physical and/or chemical and/or biological conditions. Important: you can go out and look at all the surface ENVIRONMENTS in the modern world to help you in your DEPOSITIONAL interpretations, but you should keep in mind that only a small subset of ENVIRONMENTS (on land, that is) are DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS : most are erosional ENVIRONMENTS , and they won t help you much (and maybe even mislead you badly) about DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS .

• Study of modern environments ... prescriptive or “cookbookish”, here is a set of steps you might take: • Cruise up and down the section a few times, slowly, examining it bed by ... various general models of how certain depositional environments work have been

  Model, Study, Prescriptive, Depositional