Rethinking the Incised-Valley Fill Paradigm For Campanian Book Cliffs Strata, Utah–Colorado, U.S.A.: Evidence For Discrete Parasequence-Scale, Shoreface-Incised Channel Fills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The conventional sequence stratigraphic model of large-scale incised-valley fills floored by third-order sequence boundaries is inappropriate for most of the Campanian Book Cliffs strata, Utah–Colorado, including the Desert Member to Lower Castlegate Sandstone stratigraphic interval. Shoreface-incised, parasequence-scale, deltaic river-dominated distributaries, tidally influenced distributaries, terminal distributaries, and/or tidal–estuarine channels are ubiquitous. These do not coalesce into sequence-scale incised-valley fills. There are no basinward shifts of facies across regionally mappable sequence boundaries, no sediment bypass with concomitant development of detached falling-stage and lowstand shoreface–deltaic sand bodies, and no incised-valley fill deposits in the Desert–Castlegate interval. Shoreface-incised channels occur in the uppermost proximal parts of most Desert–Castlegate parasequences, not just the parasequence-set top, as predicted by conventional models. Shoreface-incised channel fills are temporally and spatially linked to the laterally adjoining nearshore terrestrial and shallow marine facies belts, as demonstrated by correlation of coal beds and flooding surfaces. Parasequence-scale interfingering of nearshore terrestrial and shallow marine facies belts are common, with thin packages of channels, coal-bearing coastal plain with associated white-capped foreshore–shoreface sandstones, and flat-topped, rooted foreshore sandstones along most parasequence tops. Multiple, parasequence-scale, shoreface-incised channel fills are often lumped together and miscorrelated as sequence-scale incised-valley fills. Similar shoreface-incised channels occur at a variety of parasequence levels in all other members of the Blackhawk Formation. An alternative sequence stratigraphic model showing temporally and spatially linked, laterally adjoining, nearshore terrestrial and shallow marine facies belts is the best fit for the Campanian Book Cliffs strata. This model should be widely applicable to similar nearshore terrestrial and shallow marine settings worldwide. The alternative correlation style generates significantly different predictions of sand-body continuity, connectivity, and distribution. Applications to modeling and predicting subsurface hydrocarbon and fresh-water reservoirs are anticipated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".