
Robert W DalrympleQueen's University | QueensU · Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering
Robert W Dalrymple
Ph.D.
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Publications (184)
Sequence stratigraphy is the primary tool used by sedimentologists to predict bed-scale flow properties of both marine carbonate reservoirs (associated with carbon sequestration and hydrocarbon recovery) and groundwater aquifer systems. Coastal carbonate sequence stratigraphic models have been predicated upon the existence of parasequences, shallow...
Contourites are commonly associated with deep-water environments, but this study documents a shallow-water, muddy contourite drift in the centre of Taiwan Strait. The drift body (220 km long, 50–70 km wide, 0–30 m thick), with its long axis approximately colinear with the Taiwan Strait Current, is flanked on both sides by moats. Compositional data...
The Gaskiers is the oldest Ediacaran glaciation and thus represents Earth’s first icehouse since the end of the Snowball glaciations that characterized the Cryogenian world. Age bracketing of the 300-m-thick marine tillites of the Gaskiers Formation to 581–580 Ma has previously been taken as an indication that the Gaskiers glaciation was short-live...
This review of published literature examines the nature of modern carbonate coastal barrier systems, concentrating on barrier islands and their related shoals and lagoons in light of concepts derived from their siliciclastic counterparts. The observations show that subaerial coastal (C-type) barriers are common along transgressing carbonate shoreli...
Coastal mud belts, which lie parallel to the coast just seaward of the shoreface, are one of the most important settings where shallow-marine muddy deposits accumulate. However, sedimentary processes and facies distributions of coastal mud belts remain largely uninvestigated. This study uses process-oriented sedimentology, coupled with provenance a...
This study reviews the morphology, hydrodynamics and sedimentology of 33 modern straits, including examples from diverse tectonic and climatic settings. Strait morphology ranges from short, simple straits to long, tortuous passages many 100s of kilometers long; depths range from 10 m to >1 km. The morphological building block of strait sedimentatio...
Integrated sedimentologic and ichnologic studies along the Baeksu coast of southwestern Korea have revealed that despite the macrotidal conditions, the morphologic characteristics and preserved deposits of the intertidal flats show strong similarities to those commonly reported from wave-dominated shorefaces. Morphologically, a beachface is develop...
The Changjiang (i.e. the Yangtze River) debouches a huge amount of sediment to the East China Sea and exerts a significant effect on the evolution of the down-drift Qiantang River system. This study quantitatively documents the temporal change in the import of Changjiang sand and mud to the late Quaternary Qiantang River incised valley by establish...
Coastal depositional systems are normally classified based on the relative input of wave, tide, and river processes. While wave-through to river-dominated environments are well characterized , environments along the wave-to-tide continuum are relatively poorly understood and this limits the reliability and utility of coastal classification schemes....
Sand ridges, a common feature of modern open shelves, reflect persistent currents and sediment availability under recent transgressive conditions. They represent the largest bedforms in the oceans and, as such, can yield information on long‐term oceanographic processes. However, there is a limited number of tidal sand ridges documented from the roc...
The Cobequid Bay – Salmon River estuary, Bay of Fundy, does not possess particularly large tidal bores (maximum ca 30 cm). Nevertheless, detailed logging of 13 peels made from cores spread throughout the entire area influenced by tidal bores indicates that inferred tidal‐bore deposits comprise approximately 15% of the deposits in the upper‐flow‐reg...
The Khor Al Adaid embayment of southern Qatar represents a unique shallow-water mixed siliciclastic-carbonate coastal depositional system that developed in a hyper-arid climatic setting over the past 6000 years. The embayment, which was formed during the Flandrian transgression as a result of flooding across a partially fault-controlled incised flu...
Barrier islands are important landforms in many coastal systems around the globe. Studies of modern barrier island systems are mostly limited to those of siliciclastic realms, where the islands are recognized as mobile features that form on transgressive coastlines and migrate landward as sea‐level rises. Barrier islands of the ‘Great Pearl Bank' a...
The Ediacaran period saw the appearance of the first widespread ecosystems dominated by complex multicellular forms, with the earliest examples inhabiting deep waters below the photic zone. Contrary to expectation, the first appearance of large members of the Ediacara biota is sudden, and no definitive precursors have been described from earlier Ne...
The Lower Cretaceous Cadomin Formation in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin is a thin, regionally extensive, conglomeratic fluvial deposit that accumulated over many million years on the sub-Cretaceous unconformity. Based on a dataset of approximately 50 cores and 750 wireline well logs from west-central Alberta, detailed isopach mapping of the...
Integrated sedimentological and ichnological study of the gas-bearing, upper Middle Miocene strata in the southwestern Ulleung Basin has identified five main lithofacies, arranged in order from offshore and offshore transitional environments to coastal-plain channel settings. In each of repeated successions, the basal mudstone-dominated, offshore t...
This paper reexamines the late Pleistocene to early Holocene transgressive succession (ca. 19.0-8.0 cal. k.y. B.P.) beneath the modern Changjiang delta plain, one of the world's great rivers, by means of a detailed process-oriented investigation of the sedimentary facies and stratigraphic architecture in two newly drilled cores (ZK01 and ZK02), sup...
This paper describes a simple methodology for determining paleocurrent directions or fracture orientations from core that has traditionally been considered unoriented. Provided the core does not intersect bedding at a 90° angle, and that the attitude of bedding (strike and dip) and the drill hole (azimuth and inclination) are known, paleocurrent di...
The architecture and morphodynamics of modern and ancient tidal straits and in particular the deposits of strait-margin zones, have been significantly understudied compared to other marginal marine settings, even though many reservoirs in the North Sea and the Norwegian Continental Shelf are developed in narrow grabens or seaways. This paper presen...
The Han, like all tide-dominated and strongly tide-influenced deltas studied to date, exhibits the following key traits: a large subaqueous delta whose clinoform is the main subtidal locus of mud deposition in the system; gently inclined (<1°) heterolithic clinoform deposits that record deltaic progradation; and a high degree of channelization in t...
The moderate-sized, steep Han River debouches into a wide-mouthed bay along the rocky west coast of Korea. The climate is monsoonal, floodplains are limited, and summer storms are intense, resulting in rapid transfer of sediment to the basin. The sediment is reworked by tides, which are extreme (9 m maximum; speeds of 2 m/s common). Wave energy is...
Basinward dipping (0.2°) clinoform reflections within the large tidal bars indicate that the subaqueous delta platform has prograded at least 75 km out onto the shelf. At the same time, the large tidal bars that make up the platform have broadened. This is causing the intervening large tidal channels to gradually fill in. The outer progradational c...
Most subenvironments in the Han River delta, including the tidal–fluvial transition, the sandbar–swatchway (mouthbar) zone, the open-coast tidal flats adjacent to the river mouth, and even subaqueous delta platform, are highly channelized due to the significant tidal flux in and out of the coastal zone. Seismic data show that the channels commonly...
A thick (>100 m) succession of sediment overlies bedrock at the mouth of the Han River. Seismic and core data suggest it consists of at least two sequences, one Late Pleistocene and one postglacial/Holocene. Each of these sequences has a similar internal organization that records (1) pedogenesis and fluvial incision during lowstand; (2) onlapping o...
The Han River bifurcates around bedrock islands into several distributary channels. Point bars are present in these channels, which fall in the tidal-fluvial transition. Distributaries pass basinward through an area of mutually evasive flow to large tidal channels. The large tidal channels broaden and deepen basinward, eventually bottoming out at t...
The main database for this study consists of short cores, long cores, and seismic data collected from the subaqueous delta platform and shelf during the 1990 and 2000s. Previous work on the open coast tidal flats and deltaic distributary channels is also incorporated. The nature of the database is tabulated here.
To fill a significant gap in our understanding of tide-dominated deltas, this book presents a multi-faceted exploration of the Han River Delta, located on the east coast of the Yellow Sea, Korea. Topics covered are the geologic and process setting, delta morphology, the distribution of surficial sediment types, the facies present in short and long...
The Livingstone Formation and the middle Opal Member of the Mount Head Formation of western Canada are Mississippian carbonate deposits, tens to hundreds of meters thick, that are interpreted to have accumulated in a mid-ramp, wave-dominated, sub-thermocline environment, at water depths up to 100 m or more. The rocks are predominantly pelmatozoan g...
The stratigraphic organization of early synrift clastic successions is controlled by the rates of tectonic subsidence and the growth of the master faults, which, coupled with eustatic base level change, control the generation of accommodation. The 100- to 300-m (328- to 984.2-ft)-thick, highly heterolithic Lower Jurassic upper Are and Tilje success...
The Eocene Roda Formation in Northern Spain is composed of two 3rd-order, regressive-transgressive cycles that are in turn composed of at least 18 stacked progradational deltaic parasequences. Within this paper, trangressive tidal ridges that overlie and locally incise into six of these parasequences are described and documented, three in the lower...
Fluvial discharge fluctuations are a fundamental characteristic of almost all modern rivers and can produce distinctive deposits that are rarely described from ancient fluvial or mixed-energy successions. Large-scale outcrops from the Middle Jurassic Lajas Formation (Argentina) expose a well-constrained stratigraphic succession of marginal-marine d...
Sedimentation in the fluvial–marine transition is governed by the interaction of river and tidal currents. Tidal currents act continuously, albeit with small variations in strength as a result of neap–spring cyclicity and modulation by changes in river discharge. River currents, by contrast, commonly change more dramatically because of the presence...
ABSTRACT An extensive dataset (cores, seismic data) was collected by a government–industry consortium in the mid 2000s to study several ~25 km wide, ~100-km long, ~25 m high sediment fingers (“large tidal bars”, LTBs) that extend offshore of the Han River, Korea. The dataset compliments previous work on tidal flats near the river mouth and the tida...
Inclined heterolithic stratification in the Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation, exposed along the Steepbank River in north-eastern Alberta, Canada, accumulated on point bars of a 30 to 40 m deep continental-scale river in the fluvial–marine transition. This inclined heterolithic stratification consists of two alternating lithologies, sand and fine...
The Tide-Dominated Han River Delta provides a thorough analysis of a river delta in which tidal currents have reworked the river-borne sediment, generating characteristic geomorphological and sedimentological signatures in the process. Such "tide-dominated" deltas are common in the modern ocean, forming the substrate upon which entire populations a...
The Early Jurassic Upper Åre and Tilje formations are an important mature hydrocarbon reservoir in the Smørbukk field, offshore Mid-Norway. The Tilje Fm. was deposited in a tide-influenced deltaic setting during an early syn-rift tectonic stage within a NE-SW oriented half-graben sub-basin. The deltaic deposits rest erosively (SB2) over the Upper Å...
Impressions of soft-bodied Ediacaran megafossils are common in deep-water slope deposits of the June beds at Sekwi Brook in the Mackenzie Mountains of NW Canada. Two taphonomic assemblages can be recognized. Soles of turbidite beds contain numerous impressions of simple (Aspidella) and tentaculate (Hiemalora, Eoporpita) discs. A specimen of the fro...
Filling of the modern coastal-zone portion of the Qiantang River (QR) in eastern China was initiated by marine inundation during the transgression after the Last Glacial Maximum and has continued during the Holocene sea-level stillstand. The early part of the fill is transgressive in character, while the younger part is regressive. This paper deals...
The Saumane-Venasque compound palaeovalley succession accumulated in a strongly tide-influenced embayment or estuary. Warm-temperate normal marine to brackish conditions led to deposition of extensive cross-bedded biofragmental calcarenites. Echinoids, bryozoans, coralline algae, barnacles and benthic foraminifera were produced in seagrass meadows,...
Ediacaran strata in the Conception and St. John's groups that are exposed in the Catalina Dome, eastern Newfoundland, comprise a succession that is thinner but otherwise broadly similar to that known from the well-studied outcrops near Mistaken Point in southern Avalon Peninsula and Spaniard's Bay in northern Avalon. In all of these areas, strata c...
The Lower Eocene Baronia Formation in the Ager Basin is interpreted as a series of stacked compound dunes confined within a tectonically generated embayment or tidal seaway. This differs from the previous interpretation of lower Baronia sand bodies as tidal bars in the front of a delta. The key architectural building block of the succession, the de...
As defined in this chapter, an estuary forms during a shoreline transgression and then fills during a progradational phase that is transitional to a delta. The spatial distribution of processes, grain sizes and facies within tide-dominated estuaries is predictable in general terms. Tidal currents dominate sedimentation along the axis, with wave-dom...
Shallow-marine tidal deposits form on open shelves, and more specifically in open-mouthed embayments and semi-enclosed epicontinental seas, where the oceanic tide is amplified by resonance. They are also present in straits and seaways where the tidal currents are accelerated by flow constriction. Complex interactions of the tide with the seafloor a...
The first sandstone unit of the Esdolomada Member of the Roda Formation (hereafter referred to as ‘Esdolomada 1’) was formed by a laterally-migrating, shelf tidal bar. This interpretation is based on detailed mapping of the bedding surfaces on the digital terrain model of the outcrop built from light detection and ranging data and outcrop photomosa...
Channels in the coastal zone respond to water fluxes with two very
different flow patterns and periodicities: unidirectional fluvial
discharge which varies stochastically on time periods ranging from
annual to decadal (or even longer); and bidirectional tidal flux which
varies in a very regular manner on periods ranging from semi-diurnal to
annual...
Mudstone layers in the tide-dominated Bluesky Formation (i.e., the "mud drapes") have enormously variable sedimentary characteristics: they range from 0.1to 20 cm thick, can be homogeneous or internally stratified, and can have sharp or gradational upper and lower contacts. Based on recent flume studies, this diversity is interpreted to reflect the...
Beyer Eric E. Hiatt Kyser- [...]
Pettman
The Paleoproterozoic (Statherian) Thelon Formation consists of unmetamorphosed sandstone and con- glomerate that was deposited in the Thelon Basin, a continental basin in northern Canada. This study presents the first detailed sedimentological and sequence stratigraphic analysis of the expansive and under-studied western Thelon Basin, and its relat...
Shoreline habitats in the Kingston Basin have experienced continual change on a wide range of time scales, as a result of physical, chemical, and biotic stresses of both natural and anthropogenic origin. Not all change can or should be controlled. From a management perspective, stresses can be usefully subdivided into those that originate from the...
The youngest formations of the Neoproterozoic Windermere Supergroup in northwestern Canada (Gametrail, Blueflower, and Risky formations) record the transition from slope to shelf deposition on a prograding passive margin. Eleven facies associations are recognized, representing environments ranging from carbonate- and siliciclastic-dominated contine...
The Sheepbed Formation (Ediacaran) is a 1 km thick, siliciclastic unit that overlies glacial deposits of the Ice Brook Formation and is overlain by carbonates of the Gametrail Formation. Observations in the Mackenzie Mountains indicate that the Sheepbed Formation accumulated in water depths of 1–1.5 km on a passive-margin, continental slope. The lo...
The clay-sized (< 2 μm) fraction of the silty and arenaceous lutites constituting CESAR cores 14 and 103 (Alpha Ridge, central Arctic Ocean) is composed predominantly of mica (40–60%), with subequal percentages (10–20%) of kaolinite and chlorite and lesser amounts (< 5%) of smectite, quartz, plagioclase, and potassium feldspar. Calcite and dolomite...
The sequence of units (from the base up) in the Sixteen Mile Creek lagoon (Lake Ontario) mimics the longitudinal sequence of surficial environments: pink silt—overbank (flood plain – dry marsh); bottom sand—stream channel and beach; orange silt—marsh; gyttja—wet marsh and very shallow (deltaic) lagoon; and brown and grey clay—open-water lagoon. Thi...
The modern sediments in the Cataraqui River lagoon and marsh (Kingston, Ontario) consist of mixtures of organic material and clayey silts, the organic content of which increases as water depth decreases; gyttjas are accumulating in the deeper water parts of the lagoon, whereas peat is the dominant sediment in the very shallow water portion of the l...
This book presents a comprehensive, contemporary review of tidal environments and deposits. Individual chapters, each written by world-class experts, cover the full spectrum of coastal, shallow-marine and even deep-marine settings where tidal action influences or controls sediment movement and deposition. Both siliciclastic and carbonate deposits a...
Sequence stratigraphy emphasizes changes in stratal stacking patterns in response to varying accommodation and sediment supply through time. Certain surfaces are designated as sequence or systems tract boundaries to facilitate the construction of realistic and meaningful palaeogeographic interpretations, which, in turn, allows for the prediction of...
Sea waters are important reformation factors for coastal relief. Mainly waves, but also tides have a significant weathering
and erosive activity and create various coastal landforms. The material produced by weathering and erosion is carried by the
waves to great distances depending on their transportation capacity level.
The Tilje Formation (Early Jurassic; 120-300 m thick) consists predominantly of heterolithic deposits and is thought to have accumulated in tide-dominated estuarine and deltaic environments in an active rift setting. Anomalously thick (>0.5 cm) and internally structureless mudstone layers, which are interpreted to represent fluid-mud deposits, are...
Firmground muds are frequently exposed on the high-tide beach face in the zone of maximum wave energy on the wave-dominated tidal flats along the southwestern coast of Korea. The firmground muds typically display open, unlined burrows, dominated by incipient Psilonichnus and Thalassinoides that cross-cut the earlier-formed softground suites, which...
We thank William Helland-Hansen for his compliments and feedback on our paper. We aimed to establish a consensus in sequence stratigraphy by using a neutral approach that focused on model-independent, fundamental concepts, because these are the ones common to various approaches. This search for common ground is what we meant by “standardization,” n...
Wave ripples were generated in a wave tunnel under large-scale oscillatory flow (orbital diameter 1-4.5 m) using two different grain sizes, very fine sand and coarse sand. The geometry of bed configurations that were produced varied strongly as a function of grain size: small anorbital ripples (wavelengths similar to 10 cm, heights < 1 cm) formed e...
Sequence stratigraphy emphasizes facies relationships and stratal architecture within a chronological framework. Despite its wide use, sequence stratigraphy has yet to be included in any stratigraphic code or guide. This lack of standardization reflects the existence of competing approaches (or models) and confusing or even conflicting terminology....
We appreciate the Comment by [Mazumder (2008)][1] on our recent paper ([Yang et al., 2008][2]), and hope that he will be a part of continuing discussion and study on the subject. Mazumder's main point is that the ratio between wave components and tidal currents plays an important role in the
The Jurassic-aged Tilje Formation (120-300 m thick) consists predominantly of heterolithic deposits and is though to have accumulated in tide-dominated estuarine and deltaic environments in an active rift setting. Individual mud layers that are anomalously thick (> 1 cm) and internally homogeneous are widespread. Bioturbation is generally absent fr...
Cross‐bedded, cool‐water, bioclastic limestones of the Te Kuiti Group on the North Island of New Zealand are composed primarily of bryozoans, echinoderms, and benthic foraminifers. Their prominent, large‐scale, unidirectional cross‐stratification is interpreted as produced by migrating subaqueous dunes on the floor of a 50–100 km wide, north‐east‐t...
Latest Neoproterozoic to earliest Cambrian strata in north-western Canada provide an example of a pre-vegetation braid-delta depositional system. Depositional environments represented in the succession include braided fluvial and braid-delta distributary channels, aeolian dune fields and interdistributary lagoons/bays, as well as mouth bar, beach t...
The topset and slope components of aggrading and accreting shelf-margin prisms, and the role of deltas in margin growth, are reviewed. Shelves are constructed by the repeated regressive–transgressive transits of deltas and other shoreline systems on the shelf platform, and when these sediment-delivery systems reach the edge of a preexisting shelf t...
Detailed observations of the intertidal deposits from two open-coast tidal flats (the Baeksu tidal flat, Korea, and Parksville Bay, Canada) suggest that wave-generated tidal bundles are created by the interaction of tidal currents and waves on the tidal flats. A complete wave bundle is composed of three distinctive rippled intervals: (1) a basal in...
Four basic types of porosity occur in sandstones: intergranular, dissolution, micro and fracture. The first three types are related to rock texture and can be considered end members of a ternary classification diagram. Fracture porosity may be associated with any other porosity type.
All sandstones initially have intergranular porosity, which, if n...
Integrated sedimentologic and ichnologic studies from the open-mouthed, Gomso Bay estuary on the western Korean coast have revealed that both tides and waves play an important role in estuarine sedimentation. Because of up-estuary decrease in wave energy, physical structures pass up-estuary from wave-dominated planar lamination and hummocky cross-s...