Updating uniformitarianism: stratigraphy as just a set of ‘frozen accidents’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract It has long been understood that the stratigraphic record is fragmentary. Barrell was the first to clearly understand the importance of accommodation, and the episodic way in which accommodation is created and removed by geological processes. He demonstrated that typically only a fraction of geological time is represented by accumulated sediment. This point was repeated in influential books by D. Ager. A significant feature of the sedimentary record is the correlation between the duration of a sedimentary unit and its sedimentation rate. Sedimentation rates range over more than eleven orders of magnitude. The durations of stratigraphic gaps, the distribution of layer thicknesses, and sedimentation rates have fractal-like properties, facilitating the integration of our knowledge of the processes of accommodation generation with data on varying sedimentation rates and the scales of hiatuses and processes operating over all time scales. This paper proposes the definition of a suite of Sedimentation Rate Scales to encompass the range of time scales and processes in the stratigraphic record. Assignment of stratigraphic units to the appropriate scale should help to clarify preservation mechanisms, leading to more complete quantitative understanding of the geological preservation machine, and a more grounded approach than earlier treatments of stratigraphic completeness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".