This comprehensive, beautifully illustrated, multi-disciplinary book summarizes the geologic record of 60 worldwide ancient and modern lake basins and their lacustrine deposits. The data and observations presented here provide critical insights into the formation and evolution of lake basins, their petroleum potential, and the complex interactions between tectonic and climatic signals recorded in their sediments.
Lake Basins through Space and Time will be valuable to geoscientists from a wide spectrum of disciplines. Petroleum explorationists will benefit from a new unifying model that clearly relates the hydrocarbon potential of a lake basin to its tectonic, stratigraphic, and geochemical framework. Geologists concerned with paleoclimate reconstructions will use the rich data and new insights, which lead to better differentiation of tectonic and climatic signals contained within lacustrine sediments.
These new basin summaries continue the work begun in a previous volume by the same renowned editors (Gierlowski-Kordesch and Kelts, 1994).
Limnogeologists, they call themselves, an international group of scientists reviving interest in the geology of very old lake basins, partly because of vast hydrocarbon potential under China, the south Atlantic marginal basins, and southeast Asia. Some of them contribute studies here on periods between the carboniferous to the quaternary. Among their topics are lake development during the evolution of Mongolia, the early Cretaceous of the Iberian Basin in northeastern Spain, lacustrine facies in the upper Cretaceous Balbuena Subgroup of the Salta Group in the Andine Basin in Argentina, alluvial and lacustrine facies of Yenicubuk formation in the Upper Kizilirmak Basin in Turkey, and late quaternary deposits in the Chilean Aliplano. The 60 chapters complement an effort to create a database of all lacustrine basins and their deposits organized according to geologic time and paleogeographic position. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
