Origin of spherulitic and cone-in-cone concretions in Cambro-Ordovician black shales, St Lawrence Estuary, Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Spherulitic concretions are very rare among carbonate concretions that generally consist of micritic carbonate. The occurrence of spherulitic concretions in Cambro-Ordovician black shales of unknown stratigraphic age on a mid-channel island in the St Lawrence Estuary in Quebec is a new example in addition to only three hitherto reported occurrences of spherulitic carbonate concretions. Their origin is still poorly understood. These concretions occur in close association with, and show various transitions to, cone-in-cone structure. The spherules, measuring 0.5 to 12 mm in diameter, consist of intergrown fine fibres of ferroan calcite and quartzine, pointing to the formation of the concretions below the sulfate-reduction zone. A phenomenological theory of spherulitic crystallization relates the thickness δ of an impurity-rich layer in front of impurity-rejecting growing crystals to the impurity-diffusion coefficient D and the growth velocity G of the crystal by δ = D/G. In spherulite-forming environments, extremely small values of δ (in the order of <10−4 cm) in conjunction with cellulation lead to spherulitic fibre growth. The theory of spherulitic crystallization is here applied to sedimentary deposits for the first time. The intimate association of calcite and quartzine in the concretions requires a chemical change from alkaline to acidic conditions, which occurs below the carbonate-reduction zone owing to the dissolution of sponge spicules or radiolarians. The transition from spherulite to the silica-free cone-in-cone structure occurs when the silica reservoir that acted as an impurity is exhausted in the crystallization process.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".