📄️ Databases require precise depositional terminology
Analog and dimensional databases for depositional environments require precise and consistent depositional terminology. This ensures a standardized data collection workflow, where similar features from different systems are mapped and categorized uniformly. It also helps users reliably find the architectural data they need.
📄️ Why use depositional hierarchies?
Sediment deposition occurs across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, creating stratigraphic architectures at multiple depositional levels. These architectures strongly influence how fluids move through the subsurface.
📄️ Sedbase process categories
Stratigraphic architecture of shallow marine and associated channelized environments is strongly affected by the processes that affected sedimentation during deposition.
📄️ Sedbase architectural categories
Sedbase uses the categories of the WAVE Process and Architectural Classification to describe sediment bodies occurring at different levels of stratigraphic architecture. See the Why Use Depositional Hierarchies? page for more details.
📄️ A modern system architecture example
Modern mapping focuses on plan view architecture. The data is derived from geomorphological interpretation of maps, which are based on aerial imagery. These maps allow us to discern the depositional history of each interval.
📄️ An ancient system architecture example
Ancient architectural mapping is based on carefully selected detailed outcrop case studies (cross sections). The information from ancient data is thus 2D, or only partially 3D, depending on outcrop exposure. The data in the database describes the lateral extent of units as well as their thickness. Depending on outcrop orientation, cross-sectional data can be dip-oriented, strike-oriented, or oblique to the regional paleo-shoreline trend.