This book is the outgrowth of a week-long conference on sandstone organized by the authors, first held at Banff, Alberta, in 1964 under the auspices of the Alberta Association of Petroleum Geologists and the University of Alberta, and again, in 1965, at Bloomington, Indiana, under the sponsorship of the Indiana Geological Survey and the Department of Geology, Indiana University. A 2- page syllabus was prepared for the second conference and published by the Indiana Geological Survey. Continuing interest in and demand for the syllabus prompted us to update and expand its contents. The result is this book. We hope this work will be useful as a text or supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in sedimentation, sedimentary petrology, or general petrology and perhaps will be helpful to the teachers of such courses. Though we have focussed on sandstones we have necessarily included much of interest to students of all sediments. We hope also that it will be a useful reference work for the professional geologist, especially those concerned with petroleum, ground-water, and economic geology either in industry or government. Because the subject is so closely tied to surface processes it may also be of interest to geo morphologists and engineers who deal with beaches and rivers where sand is in transit.

The last decade of study of the shallow-marine boundary layer has arrived at a synthesis of sediment dynamic principles that can begin to be transferred from the time scales of the rock record (years to millenia). At the same time, the technology of petroleum exploration has lead to a fundamentally new way of examining the deposits of sedimentary basins. This book applies these insights to continental shelf and continental margin deposits, providing an entirely new viewpoint to the subject.

The first edition appeared fourteen years ago. Since then there have been significant advances in our science that warrant an updating and revision of Sand and Sandstone. The main framework of the first edition has been retained so that the reader can begin with the mineralogy and textural properties of sands and sandstones, progress through their organization and classification and their study as a body of rock, to consideration of their origin-prove nance, transportation, deposition, and lithification-and finally to their place in the stratigraphic column and the basin. The last decade has seen the rise of facies analysis based on a closer look at the stratigraphic record and the recognition of characteristic bed ding sequences that are the signatures of some geologic process-such as a prograding shallow-water delta or the migration of a point bar on an alluvial floodplain. The environment of sand deposition is more closely determined by its place in such depositional systems than by criteria based on textural characteristics-the "fingerprint" approach. Our revi sion reflects this change in thinking. As in the geological sciences as a whole, the concept of plate tectonics has required a rethinking of our older ideas about the origin and accumu lation of sediments-especially the nature of the sedimentary basins.

Isolated shallow marine sand bodies are significant hydrocarbon reservoirs and understanding sand body genesis and geometry is critical to successful exploration and exploitation of these deposits. Advances in sequence stratigraphy have rekindled and refocused the discussions surrounding these important reservoirs. This volume stems from a research conference that brought together the proponents of the differing interpetation sto discuss facts and principles as they relate to isolated shallow marine sand bodies, using the controversial Lower Campanian Shannon Sandstone as the focus for discussion.