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Sediments accumulate in a wide range of settings that can be defined in terms of their
geomorphology, such as rivers, lakes, coasts, shallow seas, and so on. The physical, chemical and
biological processes that shape and characterise those environments are well known through
studies of physical geography and ecology. Those same processes determine the character of the
sediment deposited in these settings. A fundamental part of sedimentology is the interpretation of
sedimentary rocks in terms of the transport and depositional processes and then determining the
environment in which they were deposited. In doing so a sedimentologist attempts to establish the
conditions on the surface of the Earth at different times in different places and hence build up a
picture of the history of the surface of the planet.
Facies analysis
The facies concept is not just a convenient means of describing rocks and grouping sedimentary
rocks seen in the field, it also forms the basis for facies analysis, a rigorous, scientific approach to
the interpretation of strata. The lithofacies characteristics are determined by the physical and
chemical processes of transport and deposition of the sediments and the biofacies and ichnofacies
provide information about the palaeoecology during and after deposition. By interpreting the
sediment in terms of the physical, chemical and ecological conditions at the time of deposition it
becomes possible to reconstruct palaeoenvironments, i.e. environments of the past. The
reconstruction of past sedimentary environments through facies analysis can sometimes be a very
simple exercise, but on other occasions it may require a complex consideration of many factors
before a tentative deduction can be made. It is a straight forward process where the rock has
characteristics that are unique to a particular environment. Hermatypic corals have only ever
grown in shallow, clear and fairly warm seawater: the presence of these fossil corals in life
position in a sedimentary rock may therefore be used to indicate that the sediments were deposited
in shallow, clear, warm, seawater. The analysis is more complicated if the sediments are the
products of processes that can occur in a range of settings. For example, crossbedded sandstone
can form during deposition in deserts, in rivers, deltas, lakes, beaches and shallow seas: a cross-
bedded sandstone lithofacies would therefore not provide us with an indicator of a specific
environment. Interpretation of facies should be objective and based only on the recognition of the
processes that formed the beds. So, from the presence of symmetrical ripple structures in a fine
sandstone it can be deduced that the bed was formed under shallow water with wind over the
surface of the water creating waves that stirred the sand to form symmetrical wave ripples. The
shallow water interpretation is made because wave ripples do not form in deep water but the
presence of ripples alone does not indicate whether the water was in a lake, lagoon or shallow-
marine shelf environment. The facies should therefore be referred to as symmetrically rippled
sandstone or perhaps wave rippled sandstone, but not lacustrine sandstone because further
information is required before that interpretation can be made.
Facies associations
The characteristics of an environment are determined by the combination of processes which
occur there. A lagoon, for example, is an area of low energy, shallow water with periodic influxes
of sand from the sea, and is a specific ecological niche where only certain organisms live due to
enhanced or reduced salinity. The facies produced by these processes will be muds deposited from
standing water, sands with wave ripples formed by wind over shallow water and a biofacies of
restricted fauna. These different facies form a facies association that reflects the depositional
environment. When a succession of beds are analysed in this way, it is usually evident that there
are patterns in the distribution of facies. For example, beds of the bioturbated mudstone occur
more commonly with (above or below) the laminated siltstone or the wave rippled medium
sandstone? Which of these three occurs with the coal facies? When attempting to establish
associations of facies it is useful to bear in mind the processes of formation of each. Of the four
examples of facies just mentioned the bioturbated mudstone and the wave rippled medium
sandstone both probably represent deposition in a subaqueous, possibly marine, environment
whereas medium sandstone with rootlets and coal would both have formed in a subaerial setting.
Two facies associations may therefore be established if, as would be expected, the pair of
subaqueously deposited facies tend to occur together, as do the pair of subaerially formed facies.
The procedure of facies analysis therefore can be thought of as a two-stage process. First, there is
the recognition of facies that can be interpreted in terms of processes. Second, the facies are
grouped into facies associations that reflect combinations of processes and therefore environments
of deposition. The temporal and spatial relationships between depositional facies as observed in
the present day and recorded in sedimentary rocks were recognised by Walther. Walther’s Law can
be simply summarised as stating that if one facies is found superimposed on another without a
break in a stratigraphic succession those two facies would have been deposited adjacent to each
other at any one time. This means that sandstone beds formed in a desert by aeolian dunes might
be expected to be found over or under layers of evaporates deposited in an ephemeral desert lake
because these deposits may be found adjacent to each other in a desert environment. However, it
would be surprising to find sandstones formed in a desert setting overlain by mudstones deposited
in deep seas: if such is found, it would indicate that there was a break in the stratigraphic
succession, i.e. an unconformity representing a period of time when erosion occurred and/or sea
level changed.
Facies sequences/successions
A facies sequence or facies succession is a facies association in which the facies occur in a
particular order. They occur when there is a repetition of a series of processes as a response to
regular changes in conditions. If, for example, a bioclastic wackestone facies is always overlain by
a bioclastic packstone facies, which is in turn always overlain by a bioclastic grainstone, these
three facies may be considered to be a facies sequence. Such a pattern may result from repeated
shallowing-up due to deposition on shoals of bioclastic sands and muds in a shallow marine
environment. Recognition of patterns of facies can be on the basis of visual inspection of graphic
sedimentary logs or by using a statistical approach to determining the order in which facies occur
in a succession, such as a Markov analysis. This technique requires a transition grid to be set up
with all the facies along both the horizontal and vertical axis of a table: each time a transition
occurs from one facies to another (e.g. from bioclastic wackestone to bioclastic packstone facies)
in a vertical succession this is entered on to the grid. Facies sequences/sucessions show up as
higher than average transitions from one facies to another.