Field Guides to Exceptionally Exposed Carbonate Outcrops

This exceptional volume presents fourteen detailed and richly illustrated examples of classic carbonate platform outcrops spanning an age range of Devonian to Miocene and locations including Europe, North America, Australia, Africa, China and the Middle East.

One of the key aspects that makes geology uniquely different as a science is the nature of field data collection. The ability to identify myriads of features at different scales, often in incompletely exposed outcrops, commonly in physically demanding, sometimes uncomfortable or even hazardous conditions, and to be able to relate those observations to temporal and structural contexts, is one of the most demanding activities in natural sciences. This volume is a celebration of the achievements of how rigorous field geology has elucidated the interaction of physical and biological processes over 400 million years (from Devonian) of Earth history, to produce often spectacular carbonate outcrops. In doing so, it illustrates what, for many of us, makes geology different and special. The guides in this volume are the culmination of many hundreds of person-years of painstaking fieldwork. The documentation and interpretation have been based on the ever-evolving understanding of how large-scale carbonate systems develop.

As sedimentary geology moves away from its early phase of outcrop data collection, improved descriptive techniques and comparative studies towards increased quantification and modelling, we become more and more aware of the secular differences in carbonate systems and that the present is not necessarily a key to the past for the geological record of carbonate successions and depositional systems. Demonstrating these secular differences using outcrops is the theme of this compilation. The field itineraries in this volume capture the diversity of carbonate platform types through time as the producers of carbonate sediments have changed as a result of biological evolution and global environmental, geodynamic and climatic changes.

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