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Mud and Mudstones: Introduction and Overview

by Paul Potter, Barry Maynard and Pedro Depetris. Springer, 2005, xi + 297 pp. [ISBN 3-540-22157-3]. Price $89.95.

School of Earth, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In the preface to this interesting book the authors note that their aims are to provide answers to eight sequential questions:

How are mud and silt produced?

How are they transported and deposited?

What is the role of oxygen at the site of deposition?

What is known about mud in modern environments?

What are the controlling processes and changes that occur with burial?

How do we determine the provenance of mud and mudstone?

How do we study ancient mudstone-rich basins?

What are the practical aspects of muds and mudstones?

To my mind these questions are important and this book will be useful to sedimentologists if it meets these aims. In this review my aims are to consider whether or not the authors do provide answers to these questions and the extent to which other areas of this broad discipline are covered.

In order to meet their aims, the authors discuss in Chapter 1 (Overview) the thorny problem of the nomenclature used by researchers to describe fine-grained sediments and sedimentary rocks. In this discussion they initially take a narrow view that mud is sedimentary material (<4 µm) and silt is material between 4 and 63 µm. They then go on take a rather more realistic position, namely that mud and mudstones are most commonly defined as being all-inclusive terms for fine-grained sediments and sedimentary rocks, respectively, with silt being defined as sediment in the grain-size fraction <63 µm to >4 µm and clay being defined as sedimentary material <4 µm (rather than the more usual usage of the silt/clay boundary being at 2 µm). With this point out of the way they describe the commercial uses of these materials, and point out that in spite of being very common, they are generally poorly known relative to other sediment types.

In Chapter . . . [Full Text of this Article]