Welcome to the Sedimentology and Stratigraphy course at The College of Wooster. This is a web syllabus (more like a course blog, actually) for use every week by the class and any other interested students or geologists. Each week I will add links to pages relevant to lecture, lab and the field trip. I will usually just be a week ahead, since links change rapidly in this field. The notes and other specific course items can be found at the end of this page. If you have any suggestions for this web syllabus, especially pertinent links, please send me an e-mail message. We have a separate page describing faculty and student research in sedimentology and stratigraphy at Wooster, as well as our Paleontology and Sed/Strat Independent Study webpage. You may also want to see our Desert Geology course webpage.

Geology 260 is a "writing intensive" course, so on successful completion you will receive a "W" for your curriculum requirements. We will study and experiment with many types of writing in this course, especially analytical, scientific and popular science writing.

This course is a survey of the description, formation, and distribution of sedimentary rocks, which are almost three-fourths of the rocks exposed on the Earth's surface. Most of the details we know about Earth history come from sedimentary rocks and the fossils within them. Many of our primary economic resources, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, are contained within sedimentary rocks. Our goals this semester are to understand how these rocks are formed and learn what types of stratigraphic, paleoenvironmental, and tectonic information can be recovered from them. By the end of the course, you should also be able to identify and interpret any sedimentary rock specimen, and to be able to express this understanding through a variety of writing exercises.

I hope you find this course as much fun as I do!

Mark A. Wilson

Department of Geology

The College of Wooster

Wooster, OH 44691 USA

mwilson@wooster.edu

Schedule of Lecture and Laboratory Sessions

(With Weekly Links to Other Web Resources)

 

Lectures in Scovel Hall Room 205, Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00 - 9:20 a.m.

Lab Sessions in Scovel Hall Room 216, Tuesday and Thursday 1:00 - 2:20 p.m.

January 15 & 17

Web Resources for Week #1:

A thorough understanding of geologic time is fundamental in any geology course, but it is especially critical in Sedimentology & Stratigraphy. Please refresh your memory of the Geologic Time Scale as soon as you can. (Here's a nice little test you can take.) Note: Because the particular required terms of the Geological Time Scale for this class are unclear from the above links, I've posted a MicroSoft Word version of our time scale as well as our own pdf version. You will see that I recognize the Ediacaran Period before the Cambrian. Columbia University has an especially good discussion of geologic time and the concepts behind its description and measurement. Remember that geologists make a crucial distinction between relative and absolute time, which is usually calculated radiometrically. Radiocarbon dating is a special case of radiometric dating; it is well described at this New Zealand website.

Georgia Perimeter College has a page with a detailed summary of sediments and sedimentary rocks. There is more information here than we need in this first week, but the images are colorful! Here's a page that you may use often this semester: Web Resources for Sedimentary Geologists (from the University of Oregon). You will see the delightful range of studies within sedimentary geology, from the interface with chemistry (low-temperature diagenesis) to the combination of sediments and biology (ichnology), along with plate tectonics, radiometric dating, sequence stratigraphy, and paleoenvironmental interpretations. Finally for introductory material, here is a webpage from the University of British Columbia on the petrography of siliciclastic rocks. It has many short and useful descriptions of the topics we are covering this week in lecture and lab.

Our lectures and labs on the fabrics and textures of sediments and sedimentary rocks are not overly exciting, although I'll work hard on it! Here's a cute graphic for the Udden-Wentworth grain-size scale. The Wikipedia page on grain sizes is pretty good. Click on this for a grain-size analysis exercise which we could learn from. Ours will be simpler!

Geology in the News:

January 22 & 24

Web Resources for Week #2:

How can I make sedimentary dynamics, at least the numerical parts, interesting? The Web doesn't help much. We could learn a bit about Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) of Stokes' Law. Most of the web material, though, consists of lectures on the weathering and erosion (Western Washington University), calculating pages for Reynolds Number and the Froude Number, and the details of the Bernoulli Effect and Hjulstrom's Diagram. Fortunately the US Government has livened things up a bit with a series of Quicktime movies of sedimentary bedforms in action, along with more than you want to know on bedform classes. This is a very nice presentation -- you'll see that you have lots of viewing choices. The USGS also provides downloadable software for simulating ripple and dune bedforms and crossbedding. They even include ripples on Mars! We'll have more pretty pictures and movies when we begin studying particular sedimentary environments. Dr. Lynn Fichter of James Madison University has a good summary site on sedimentary rocks.

It is not too early to begin thinking about your research project. We'll talk about your ideas in lab. Topics will be due in lab a week from Thursday.

Geology in the News:

January 29 & 31

Web Resources for Week #3:

It appears that just-plain-stratigraphy sites are also uncommonly dull. So many lecture outlines, so few useful pages. The Geology and Geological Time page of the University of California, Berkeley, is not bad as an introduction, especially for those of you with just one previous geology course. You can always practice your stratigraphic skills with this elaborate dating assignment you can download and then cut into little cards. (I wouldn't bother, but maybe you have a roommate with little to do?) Georgia Perimeter College has a simple but colorful lecture outline on facies and related concepts. You can even check out "experimental stratigraphy" at the University of Minnesota. As for applied stratigraphy, I like this colorful Belgian page on mud mounds. This elaborate website on the geology of the south-central coast of England is also a very good example of stratigraphy in action (and where Monica Umstead and Erica Clites did their IS research three summers ago). For future reference you may want to download this pdf of the latest GSA timescale. Suitable for posting in a room or carrel! For the lab, you can't beat these excellent images of sedimentary structures.

We will talk again in class about choosing a research paper topic. Search through your textbook and on the Web for sedimentological subjects which interest you.

Hand lenses! Hand lenses! Click either link for a selection of hand lenses you can order online. Lots of choices from this site (amateurgeologist.com -- even though you are now semi-professionals). My only recommendations are to never get a lens more than 14X unless it has its own illuminator, and I'm not a fan of buying anything from the Stalinist nation of Belarus (whose dictator has a silly little moustache).

Geology in the News:

February 5 & 7

Web Resources for Week #4:

This week we continue our discussion of the sedimentology of desert systems. (You'll have to just endure my enthusiasm for deserts.) To fully sample my joy, I simply must link you to our 2005 Desert Geology course webpage, including the photographs page from our Mojave Desert field trip. I wish we were offering this course again this year, but maybe next year it will return in some form. You may also want to see our 2004 "Wooster Geologists In Israel", 2005 "Wooster in Israel", and 2007 "Geology Fieldwork in Israel" photographs for images of the Negev and Sinai Deserts. (You may recognize some people in the last one!) There are some other more spectacular desert geology websites. Start with the USGS page set on the geology and resources of deserts. You can then move to specific desert pages, such as those from the USGS on the Mojave Desert. (Check out the Kelso Dunes, a place I enjoyed many hours as a kid. Also their list of photographs of the Mojave.) The Great Sand Dunes National Monument also has superb geology sections, as does Death Valley National Park. Doesn't it all look so warm from freezing Wooster, Ohio! Here is a nice site for Space Shuttle photographs of the Atacama Desert in Chile. (The photographs are taken by the GeoCam.) The DesertUSA commercial site will introduce you to other desert pages and images, including a panoramic view from Joshua Tree National Park. Since we're talking about wind processes this week, you must see these cool 360-degree photographs of the Magilligan Sand Dunes in Northern Ireland. (Yes, not a desert, but I couldn't resist!) You can do the same at the Bruneau Dunes in Idaho. I love the Web.

Here is a cool "virtual sand" website produced by "Dr. Dave the Sandman" at Pasadena City College. You can look here at sands from around the world at various magnifications. Very nice.

For fluvial systems, you may want to start with this webpage on the aging of rivers, complete with Quicktime movies. Here is a nice set of pages on alluvial deposits (emphasizing placer gold).

The Timken Science Library people have a wonderful tutorial webpage for library research. It is new and highly recommended for students starting sed/strat research papers!

NASA has an extraordinary website called "The Visible Earth". It is a diverse and large set of satellite and Space Shuttle images of the Earth's surface, all searchable. Try searching for views of deserts from space.

Geology in the News:

February 12 & 14

Web Resources for Week #5:

With deltas and estuaries we can apply all those principles of aquatic sedimentation we have learned, and add a few more. The Danube Delta looks like an interesting place to visit, even if it is under siege from pollution and over-fishing. The Niger Delta is a much more socially-troubled place because it is so rich in petroleum. The Ganges Delta is gorgeous from space, as shown in this NASA "Earth as Art" image. Has there ever been a more perfect delta than that of the Nile River? You glacial enthusiasts might like this image of outwash deltas from the Tasman River in New Zealand. This small site from the USGS on the San Francisco Bay and Delta region is interesting for both the deltaic and estuarine issues. We cannot, of course, forget America's greatest delta, that of the Mighty Mississip. For an introduction to Mississippi River Delta geological issues, click into the Coastal Studies Institute pages from Louisiana State University. There is also a series of animations showing land losses along the Louisiana coast. Do you know why this erosion is occurring? The USGS has a large set of wonderful satellite images of the Pearl River Delta in southern China. How about this possible delta on Mars? A good summary page on deltas is this one from Wikipedia.

When you get a chance, check out this wonderful geologic and physiographic map of the USA from the USGS. The panorama movie of the map is the best part.

Here's a funny-if-it-wasn't-so-sad example of creationist "geology" as it intersects with sedimentology. Tas Walker, an engineer with a bachelor's degree in geology, takes on the issue of paleosols as a challenge to flood geology. He is responding to a paleosol webpage by Dr. Joe Meert at the University of Florida. The hilarious errors of Walker are demonstrated in Dr. Meert's response webpage. This is what happens when a scientist loses his objectivity.

I've posted a first lecture test to give you an example of tests in this course. Your test will be different!

Geology in the News:

February 19 & 21

Web Resources for Week #6:

The USGS Coastal and Marine Geology Program maintains an extensive set of webpages. One of the most interesting for coastal geology covers the coastal damage produced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including amazing lidar images of pre- and post-hurricane coastal changes in three dimensions. El Nino is a climatic state which greatly affects coastal processes, especially on the west coast of the USA; on this topic you might want to see the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean website from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Here are some simple wave animations, including water waves, showing particle motion. They are oddly relaxing. The ultimate wave website is produced at Virginia Tech. On that site I found this wonderful set of breaking wave animated models from Cornell. Don't forget to look at surf webcams to escape this strangely variable Ohio winter! I like this set from Great Britain, even if most of the cameras seem to be out of order.

We now know much about tsunamis and their often tragic effects. The Tsunami Information Website has tsunami graphics and simulations, including this summary page on the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The PBS webpage on tsunamis has graphic stories and a small animation. The University of Washington has a scary little animation of a Pacific tsunami (it takes about a minute to load, but is worth it).

When it comes to understanding the difference between spring and neap tides, you can't beat this simple animation by James Irwin which I used in class last week. (If I can just figure out how to slow it down.) There is a nice barrier island panorama and other images from the coast of North Carolina on this website from Barry Yerrick. You can also look at some beach profile animations on Long Island produced by geologists at Hofstra University.

As you continue work on your research projects, you may want to revisit the excellent Web Resources for Sedimentary Geologists site. Here are a couple websites you may appreciate for your thin-section work in this course and Petrology. First, the Open University in England has an online demonstration of a "virtual microscope". You can turn on the cross-polarized light and rotate the stage. Second, the University of Bristol (England) has a thin-section mineralogy and petrology page which is very helpful for basic principles.

I like this "Geologist's Lifetime Field List" which is a fully-illustrated compendium of places and sites every geologist should eventually see. There is a well-known geological quotation: "The best geologist is the one who sees the most rocks". I'm always suspicious of a geologist who doesn't like to go in the field. This lifetime field list is inspiring. So much to see out there!

Geology in the News:

Feb 26 & 28

Assignments: Essay #1 due in class on Tuesday; Osgood Lecture (Paul Olsen) on Wednesday, February 27, at 7:30 p.m. in Lean Lecture Room (Wishart Hall); “Mega Eruptions, Mega Impacts, Mass Extinctions, and the Shape of Life”; this is a required class lecture. (Preparation questions)

Web Resources for Week #7:

It is with carbonate rocks that we see most distinctly that life is a geological process. The large majority of carbonate sediments are directly derived from living systems, and as such they are excellent indicators of past depositional environments. We can start with this tribute to calcium carbonate written by an enthusiastic sedimentologist at the University of Georgia. My sentiments exactly! You will also want to see these ultimate mineralogy pages for calcite, aragonite and dolomite. For simple introductions to carbonate sedimentology, visit the carbonate pages of Georgia Perimeter College. They are a bit light on graphics, but we'll get plenty of that later. For an introduction to carbonate petrology, check out the carbonate hardground website from your Sed/Strat colleagues of a few years ago. You may want to also look at some of the carbonate projects which Wooster students have been involved in through Senior I.S. As we approach more detailed carbonate topics, please visit this extensive website from Paris on carbonate biomineralization. There are some very good photomicrographs of carbonate rocks on this Korean webpage. And we must take a field trip to the Bahamas someday. For now we have to do it virtually!

Geology in the News:

March 4 & 6

Web Resources for Week #8:

Carbonate sediments are gifts of the sea, so let's go there first. Maybe you'd like to stay in this nice little resort in Belize? Three years ago during Spring Break, Drew Feucht and I worked on his IS project at this wonderful Caribbean resort deep among the carbonates: Stella Maris on Long Island in the Bahamas. Scubamom (yes, Scubamom) has dozens of photographs from the British Virgin Islands she is anxious to share. (You have to tolerate a level of misspelling.) Andrea Molod has a presentation on the biology and geology of Florida's coral reefs. Dekalb College in Georgia has a good coral reefs page with lots of links. NOAA has a wonderful website called "The Coral Kingdom" with many online photographs of reef animals and plants. Their National Underwater Research Program photo album is also very good. For that matter, visit the NOAA oceans page for links to extraordinary marine resources and images. You will also want to visit the homepage of the Coral Reef Alliance. The health of coral reefs is a great concern. Here's a detailed USGS website which explores the hypothesis that airborne Saharan dust is devastating Atlantic and Caribbean coral systems. The World Resources Institute has an excellent site on endangered coral reefs around the world. Let's not forget all those wonderful ancient reefs as well. Everyone will want to visit "Jurassic Reef Park". Try also a variety of reef pages in German!

For your research papers (and any other papers in this department, including Independent Study theses) remember that we have a departmental writing style standard, that stipulated for the journal Geology. You'll find all sorts of helpful details on this page, including reference formats for particular types of citations. Your papers will often be longer than submissions to Geology, but you can still follow their guidelines for precision, accuracy and organization.

Enjoy the Spring Break! Elyssa and I will be in Israel collected lots of sedimentary rocks and fossils. Check out photos from the trip last year to the Negev with Meredith and Sophie.

Geology in the News:

March 25 & 27

Web Resources for Week #9:

We will spend most of your first week back from Break finishing carbonates and their depositional environments. Be sure to check out the Wikipedia pages on calcite seas and carbonate hardgrounds. Excellent pages, if I must say so myself. We will then move into deeper marine systems. Start with an absolutely beautiful (and large) color physiographic map of the oceans and continents, courtesy of your federal government. This would make a nice desktop image, suitably slimmed down. Here is another NOAA map showing the ocean floors only, again in vivid colors. These will make you proud to be a geologist. Move on to a sediment-thickness map (a work-in-progress from NOAA) and we can begin our week's material. (Be ready to explain the thickness patterns.) The NASA SeaWIFS Project has stunning color satellite images of the oceans. You will also enjoy the detailed virtual Ocean Planet exhibition at the Smithsonian. The world's greatest source of information about deep-sea sediments is housed in the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Deep-Sea Sample Repository. Their website is excellent, with numerous illustrations and project pages. When you think you know something about ocean and continental crust, take this multiple-choice test from the University of South Dakota.

Here is an interesting sedimentology page from Roger Suthren at the University of Derby. It has many useful images and links you might finmd helpful in your research projects.

I've added quite a bit to our Paleo-Sed-Strat Independent Study webpage, including links at the bottom to recent PowerPoint presentations by my students. You might get some ideas for your own presentations!

Geology in the News:

April 1 & 3

Assignments: Lecture Test #2 (Thursday, April 3) (Preparation questions)

Web Resources for Week #10:

For evaporites, there is nothing quite like a virtual field trip to a sabkha, courtesy of Dr. Ian West. Dr. West, who, as we Americans often say, is "very British," also has a comprehensive page of sedimentary geology web resources, including bibliographies. It may be useful for your research paper. If you want to see all the things that can hurt you on a geological field trip, check out his safety page.

Back to evaporites, the Wikipedia page on them is a good gateway of information and links. I recently worked with the evaporites in the Purbeck Formation (Jurassic-Cretaceous) of southern England. We can take another virtual field trip to the Great Salt Lake in Utah to see modern evaporites forming. (I was just there last year and will show plenty of photos in lecture.) You can also take a short trip to Badwater in Death Valley -- the lowest point in North America -- where salts of various kinds are forming from evaporation. Look at this salt encrusting the shoreline of the Dead Sea. While we're on that topic, check out the salt-encrusted grill Allison Mione found on the Israeli shoreline of the Dead Sea while on an I.S. field trip. Amazing. Did you know that during the Miocene the Mediterranean Sea became a vast evaporative basin? Of course you didn't -- this is why you need me!

I've posted an example of Lecture Test #2 to give you an idea of format and the kind of questions asked. Your test, obviously, will be different. (Although I'm not above recycling a good question or two.)

Geology in the News:

April 8 & 10

Web Resources for Week #11:

The most important ironstones are the banded iron formations, which form the bulk of Michigan's iron industry. "GeoMan" has a page on banded iron formations. Here is a lecture on banded iron formations from the University of Vermont. Nothing very exciting. Chert is not a big topic on the Web, but here's a page describing the origin of cherts in the Monterey Formation (Miocene) of California. Here is another nice page on radiolarian cherts in California. Phosphorites are even less common on the Web. Here's a dull page on phosphorites; a review of oceanic phosphorites is here; and let's liven it up (a bit!) with some photos found on this ocean sediments webpage. Otherwise I must say this is a rather boring week for our webpages!

Geology in the News:

April 15 & 17

Web Resources for Week #12:

King Coal and Big Oil this week. We're thoroughly modern here, so let's start with the Wikipedia page on coal, which is very good. My colleague at SIU Carbondale has a thorough coal research page (but he should ditch the photo of himself). He has a stunning collection of images in his Coal and Carbon Compounds Petrographic Atlas. A visit to the World Coal Institute page will give you a sense of the magnitude of coal production. Petroleum is remarkable stuff -- so much energy packed into such a convenient fluid. You may want to visit the website of the American Petroleum Institute, the Global Petroleum Club (such shiny happy people), and the Energy Information Agency to see just how dependent we are on the black gold. There are few topics in geology so politically volatile as petroleum, even to the question of whether oil is really biogenic or not. (I say of course it's from life sources, but a debate rages.)

Methane hydrates (also known as "methane clathrates") are fascinating hydrocarbon deposits. "The fuel of the future may be ice that burns," you'll read on this Oak Ridge National Laboratory webpage on methane hydrates. The USGS also has a methane hydrates fact sheet which reminds us that the methane contained in these ices is a greenhouse gas with considerable potential to warm the Earth's atmosphere significantly and quickly. This certainly has happened in the past, possibly during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. There is now even an experimental methane hydrate production well in the permafrost of the Far North.

Geology in the News:

April 22 & 24

Web Resources for Week #13:

Just two more weeks left? Hard to believe. A big two weeks, though, which include a our field trip (7:00 a.m. on Sunday!). We've worked hard.

On Tuesday I want to cover a topic I haven't lectured about for awhile: Snowball Earth. It is not covered in your textbook, so you must rely on the Web to get the proper background for the topic. The Wikipedia page cited above is very good, and even better is this Snowball Earth site from Harvard and the NSF devoted entirely to the topic. There are plenty of skeptics about this dramatic idea (see, for example, the BBC story on "Snowball Melted"). Probably the strongest case against it is presented by the proponents of an alternative "Slushball Earth". You will note throughout these stories that understanding sedimentology and stratigraphy is critical, so that's where our lessons will be.

"Tectonics and Sedimentation" is a broad topic with few direct web references. We covered most of it last week, but we'll start with a review on Tuesday. You may want to revisit Plate Tectonic theory with this thorough and well-illustrated "Volcano World" page. James Madison University has a primer on plate tectonics if you want some reminders. You can visit the page of the Tectonics and Sedimentation Working Group at the University of Alaska for a glimpse at the professional side of the topic. An excellent (and very useful) website is that of Ron Blakey at Northern Arizona University. It contains superb maps for each period and excellent discussions of issues in tectonic sedimentology. Here is an excellent website from James Madison University on the Wilson Cycle (love that name). This will be useful when we discuss sediments produced under particular tectonic conditions. James Madison University also has a good summary site on sedimentary rocks.

We will also cover general stratigraphy, which will be in part a review. There is no better resource for sequence stratigraphy than the excellent on-line guide written by my colleague Steve Holland at the University of Georgia Stratigraphy Laboratory. The extensive sequence stratigraphy webpages at the University of South Carolina are also very good. They include animations and exercises. Who needs professors these days? A nice example of applied sequence stratigraphy (in three dimensions, no less) can be found on this webpage from the Université de Lausanne (which is Swiss, not French).

Geology in the News:

April 29 & May 1

Web Resources for Week #14:

There is no better resource for sequence stratigraphy than the excellent on-line guide written by my colleague Steve Holland at the University of Georgia Stratigraphy Laboratory. The extensive sequence stratigraphy webpages at the University of South Carolina are also very good. They include animations and exercises. Who needs professors these days? A nice example of applied sequence stratigraphy (in three dimensions, no less) can be found on this webpage from the Université de Lausanne (which is Swiss, not French).

During the last week of this course we traditionally cover topics of our choice. We will talk about the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington and related topics, including the famous jökulhlaups. There is a good story here as well about a persistent and ingenious geologist named J Harlen Bretz. We may finish the last day of the course by briefly covering biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy. The sites I've found on the topic are either terribly dull or well below your highly-developed skills. There are many detailed pages as examples of chrono- and biostratigraphy, like this one on a proposed Ypresian/Lutetian boundary stratotype. A useful page is this one detailing the application of magnetostratigraphy in the Pleistocene of Washington.

Geology in the News:

As with all our advanced courses, we have a framework of tests covering the specific material. In Sedimentology & Stratigraphy there are two lecture tests and two laboratory tests, each worth 10% of the final grade. The lecture tests will, naturally, be derived from lecture material, and the lab tests are from our lab work. You will see, though, that lab and lecture concepts are not easily separated -- there may be ideas we introduce in lecture but cover in more detail in lab, and vice versa. We will thus distinguish between the two types of tests by saying that lab tests have specimens and lecture tests do not. The final examination (20% of the grade) will directly combine lab and lecture. These tests are a type of "in-class" writing assignment, so we will talk about the best ways to craft written responses to scientific questions. Those of you who have had my courses before will not be surprised to see that we also will have 12 unannounced quizzes in lab and lecture for a total of 10% of the grade. This system encourages you to review your notes and the readings before each lecture and lab. You must be present in class to take a quiz (there are no "make-ups"), but the lowest two quiz grades are dropped at the end of the semester. Occasionally I will collect your written answers to the preparation questions in class and grade them as quizzes.

The laboratory will include experiments, rock identification (with hand specimens and thin-sections), quantification of sedimentary rock features, stratigraphic correlations, and maybe an occasional local field trip (inasmuch as we can do field work in the winter here!). As with most geology labs, we will not always use the full lab periods, and some of your work will be done outside the scheduled lab hours. We will also use at least a half-hour of lab time each week for writing instruction and discussion.

There are several writing assignments in this course, each of which is designed for as much writing instruction as evaluation. The most prominent will be a 10-15 page research paper on a sedimentological or stratigraphic topic which goes beyond what we do in class or lab. A preliminary draft of this paper will be due three weeks before the final version so that you have an opportunity to revise your work. The preliminary draft is worth 5% of your course grade, and the final version is worth 15%. See our Geology I.S. Manual webpage for our writing style standard. There will be two sed/strat essays, each 2-3 pages long, during the semester. Together they will count as 10% of your final course grade. One of them will be an analysis of a recent scientific paper (which you will receive in class), and the other will likely be a popular article about a recent geological news event or something related to your research paper. The paper and the popular article will be chosen from what appears during the semester of interest to the class, so I cannot now give you due dates. These essays can be revised and submitted again for another grade; your final grade will be an average of the two. Finally, your twice-weekly written answers to the preparation questions are a part of this course's writing program. These papers will occasionally be collected, as described above.

On Sunday, April 27, we will have a field trip to southern Ohio (leaving Scovel at 7:00 a.m.). We are doing it late in the semester to improve our chances for good weather and because you will be better sedimentologists and stratigraphers. We will describe, measure, sample, and interpret sedimentary rocks in the wild. This field trip is required for everyone, so tell coaches, professors, boyfriends, girlfriends, Mom, Dad, and roommates now. You may want to see the webpage for the 2007 field trip.

The faculty of the College has recently approved a new policy regarding conflicts between extracurricular and academic events. I agree with it and will simply provide the suggested syllabus statement from the discussion: "The College of Wooster is an academic institution and its fundamental purpose is to stimulate its students to reach the highest standard of intellectual achievement. As an academic institution with this purpose, the College expects students to give the highest priority to their academic responsibilities. When conflicts arise between academic commitments and complementary programs (including athletic, cultural, educational, and volunteer activities), students, faculty, staff, and administrators all share the responsibility of minimizing and resolving them. As a student you have the responsibility to inform the faculty member of potential conflicts as soon as you are aware of them, and to discuss and work with the faculty member to identify alternative ways to fulfill your academic commitments without sacrificing the academic integrity and rigor of the course."

Welcome to Sed-Strat! I hope you enjoy this course as much as I do.

Boggs, Sam, Jr. 2005. Principles of Sedimentology and Stratigraphy. Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall, 688 pages. (I was a reviewer for this edition of the textbook, so I'm confident it will be very useful for our course.)

We will also have special readings from sedimentologic and stratigraphic journals or other sources if our topics become newsworthy this semester. Please note that the Boggs textbook is used in lab as well as lecture.

I have a weekly appointment schedule posted outside my office door in Scovel. Please sign up for an appointment if you have any questions or just want to talk. (And I love to talk!)