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Black shales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

William Kohlberger
William Kohlberger*
Affiliation:
Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, P.O. Box 6666, New Haven, Connecticut 06511
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Extract

In earlier and simpler times in North American geology, there was an extraordinarily large amount of unexplored ground per available geologist to study it. State and territorial geological surveys, which undertook the first comprehensive mapping programs in the nineteenth century, were at first able to make only the grossest descriptions of outcrops in order to complete their assignments to map an area. In these pioneer surveys, black shales stood out as very easily identifiable strata; characteristically colored, fine grained, with distinctive lamination, and well known to lack fossils found so commonly in adjacent strata. “Black shale, undivided” is a very familiar legend in older outcrop descriptions; the lack of comparability of black shales to other strata effectively prevented their division, for both conceptual and technical reasons. This is one of the many paradoxes we can recognize in relation to black shales; they are as difficult to interpret as they are easy to recognize.

Type
Current Happenings
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Winter 1983 , pp. 9 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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References

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