This book is the outgrowth of a week-long conference on sandstone organized by the authors, first held at Banff, Alberta, in 1964 under the auspices of the Alberta Association of Petroleum Geologists and the University of Alberta, and again, in 1965, at Bloomington, Indiana, under the sponsorship of the Indiana Geological Survey and the Department of Geology, Indiana University. A 2- page syllabus was prepared for the second conference and published by the Indiana Geological Survey. Continuing interest in and demand for the syllabus prompted us to update and expand its contents. The result is this book. We hope this work will be useful as a text or supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in sedimentation, sedimentary petrology, or general petrology and perhaps will be helpful to the teachers of such courses. Though we have focussed on sandstones we have necessarily included much of interest to students of all sediments. We hope also that it will be a useful reference work for the professional geologist, especially those concerned with petroleum, ground-water, and economic geology either in industry or government. Because the subject is so closely tied to surface processes it may also be of interest to geo morphologists and engineers who deal with beaches and rivers where sand is in transit.

The last decade of study of the shallow-marine boundary layer has arrived at a synthesis of sediment dynamic principles that can begin to be transferred from the time scales of the rock record (years to millenia). At the same time, the technology of petroleum exploration has lead to a fundamentally new way of examining the deposits of sedimentary basins. This book applies these insights to continental shelf and continental margin deposits, providing an entirely new viewpoint to the subject.

This fully revised and updated edition introduces the reader to sedimentology and stratigraphic principles, and provides tools for the interpretation of sediments and sedimentary rocks. The processes of formation, transport and deposition of sediment are considered and then applied to develop conceptual models for the full range of sedimentary environments, from deserts to deep seas and reefs to rivers. Different approaches to using stratigraphic principles to date and correlate strata are also considered, in order to provide a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of sedimentology and stratigraphy. The text and figures are designed to be accessible to anyone completely new to the subject, and all of the illustrative material is provided in an accompanying CD-ROM. High-resolution versions of these images can also be downloaded from the companion website for this book at: www.wiley.com/go/nicholssedimentology.