Facies and the Architecture of Estuarine Tidal Bar in the Lower Cretaceous Mcmurray Formation, Central Athabasca Oil Sands, Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, data obtained from the Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation in the central Athabasca Oil Sands, northeastern Alberta, Canada, are examined and used to establish the architecture of stacked fluvial and estuarine tidal bar deposits. A total of 13 distinguishable facies (F1–F7, F8a–F8b, and F9–F13) corresponding to stacked fluvial and estuarine deposits are recognized. These facies are then reassembled into four facies associations: fluvial deposits, tidal flat, tidal bar complex, and tidal bar cap. Of these, the lower fluvial deposits show a highly eroded channel lag and tidal influences in the cross-stratified sand and wavy interbeds. The fluvial deposits pass upwards into upper tidal-dominated tidal flats and a massive homogeneous tidal sand bar complex. Very thick tidal-influenced facies (F8a–F8b, up to 22 m) caused by semi-diurnal and semi-lunar cycles are also observed in tidal flats. Based on studies of the facies and facies associations, a three-dimensional (3-D) architecture model is finally established and used to analyze the internal distribution of the stacked fluvial and estuarine deposits. This is the first time that a 3-D model of the paleo-estuary tidal bar has been constructed. The results of this study will assist future research analyzing the architecture of stacked fluvial and estuarine deposits.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".