The four decades from about 1950 are of interest because they encompassed a flowering of our understanding of the carbonate fabrics we see with the microscope. The history of this period is dealt with in greater detail in Bathurst (1993: errors no fault of author) with extensive references. This growth from a topic that was almost unheard of in universities (my “sedimentary petrology” lessons in the postwar years were limited to the optical identification of sand grains) was much helped by funding from the oil industry.
The use of the microscope is only a natural extension of field work. What insight had William Blake when he wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand”. Until the 1950s, the study of sedimentary petrology (as it was then known) was rare, and that of diagenesis virtually unknown. However, by then, the economic importance of underground sources of water and hydrocarbon was clearly apparent and the study of sedimentology took wing. The foundations upon which post-World War...
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Bibliography
Bathurst, R.G.C., 1993. Microfabrics in carbonate diagenesis: a critical look at forty years in research. In Rezak, R., and Lavoie, D.L. (eds.), Carbonate Microfabrics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 3–14.
Einsele, G., Ricken, W., and Seilacher, A. (eds.), 1991. Cycles and Events in Stratigraphy. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Jeans, C.V., and Rawson, P.F. (eds.), 1980. Andros Island, Chalk and Oceanic Oozes: Unpublished Work of Maurice Black. Yorkshire Geological Society, Occasional Publication 5.
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© 1978 Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.
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Bathurst, R.G.C. (1978). Carbonate diagenesis and microfabrics. In: Middleton, G.V., Church, M.J., Coniglio, M., Hardie, L.A., Longstaffe, F.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sediments and Sedimentary Rocks. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3609-5_34
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