basis, background, and methodology of lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy, and sequence stratigraphy
how and why global sea level changes at time scales from 10,000's to hundreds of millions of years (especially the sea-level history of the Quaternary)
the nature of different types of unconformities (especially the 3 main types we've discussed)
the definitions of chronostratigraphically-significant stratal surfaces as used in sequence stratigraphy (flooding surface/parasequence boundary, transgressive surface, maximum flooding surface and sequence boundary)
what a parasequence is and the general architecture of marginal-marine parasequences (especially in deltaic and wave-dominated shoreline settings)
the different parasequence set stacking patterns and how they relate to base-level change, sedimentation rate, and subsidence (aggrading, prograding, and retrograding parasequences)
the typical vertical facies successions of progradational wave-dominated and deltaic shorelines
what systems tracts are and the key surfaces that bound them
how to describe stratal geometry and recognize stratal terminations, including terminology as applied in the practice of seismic, and sequence stratigraphy (i.e. onlap, downlap, toplap, truncation, etc)
important lab topics from the last half of the semester: grain size analysis, well-logs, chrono/wheeler diagrams, & seismic interpretation
Written Abstract:
For your written assignment you will write an 200-300 word informational abstract of a recent, short, geology paper. The finalized draft of this abstract will be due on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 4pm.
Please do not plagiarize or paraphrase the original abstract of the article. It will be painfully obvious to me when grading the assignment and I will have to assign you a zero (0) grade. You may turn in the assignment to me as: 1) hard copy print out; 2) an email electronic file attachment in either .rtf (rich-text format), plain text (.txt), Apple Pages (.pages) or MS Word (.doc) format.
If you are not familiar with abstracts, or do not know how to write an abstract of a scientific paper, please refer to these web sites for hints, help, and direction:
Presentations:
Presentations will be given during the last week of class (Dec 10-14). These presentations should be no longer than 5 minutes and you will present the gist of the abstract (intro, methods, results, conclusions) within this time frame. Presentations will be graded based on how effectively you communicated this information and the general organization.
