Middle to Upper Triassic (Upper Ladinian to Lower Carnian) deep-sea sedimentary rocks crop out across a large area west of Nakhlak village, Central Iran and have been named Ashin Formation. The up to 304m thick, turbiditic, siliciclastic Ashin Formation consists of alternating turbiditic, thin- and medium-bedded calcareous sandstones, purple, fine-grained volcaniclastic sandstones, and mostly g...

Introduction: The unifying theme of the Mars Exploration Program is the search for evidence of past or present liquid water [1]. The underlying assumption behind this is that areas on Mars exposed to liquid water would have had the highest probability of capturing and preserving biomarkers. As a part of this program strategy, two Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) will launch toward Mars in 2003, w...

In this study we investigate how growth stage and depositional environment affect variability of cell properties and transport behavior of eight porcine E. coli isolates. We compared the surface properties for cells harvested during exponential and stationary growth phase and their transport behavior through columns packed with either uncoated or Fe-coated quartz sand. We then investigated corr...

A new Turonian amber occurrence, representing the oldest in situ amber locality in Australia and the southern-most locality in Gondwana, has recently been discovered in the Otway Basin of Victoria. The amber was collected from petroleum cores and many pieces contain a range of inclusions that can provide information on the depositional history of the resin. To date, one species of fern spore (C...

The extremely acidic brine lakes of the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia are home to some of the most biologically challenging waters on Earth. In this study, we employed metagenomic shotgun sequencing to generate a microbial profile of the depositional environment associated with the sulfur-rich sediments of one such lake. Of the 1.5 M high-quality reads generated, 0.25 M were mapped to pro...

Sequence stratigraphy is the study of genetically related facies within a framework of chronostratigraphically significant surfaces, where the depositional sequence is considered to be the fundamental unit for sequence-stratigraphic analysis (Van Wagoner et al., 1990). The depositional sequence is defined as a genetically related succession of strata bounded by unconformable surfaces and their ...

Thrombolitic fabrics of the Rocknest Formation, Northwest Territories, Canada (Hoffman, 1975; Grotzinger and Hoffman, 1983; Grotzinger, 1986a, 1989b) were disputed by Kennard and James (1986) and Kennard (1989) and classified as cryptomicrobial boundstones. Under close re-examination, these rocks reveal mesoscopic and microscopic fabrics which are indeed thrombolitic when considered in the cont...

A sedimentological, stratigraphical and palynological study was conducted on the upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Mesaverde Group over 27.5 km of a north-south-orientated outcrop belt in the northern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming. During the Campanian, the study area lay in the western part of the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The study aims to provide a stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental analysis...

rhaetian strata from the nayband formation of the tabas block, east- central iran, were studied palynologically. the materialexamined contained moderately diverse and well-preserved dinoflagellate cyst assemblages which lead to the identification ofrhaetogonyaulax rhaetica zone. the assigned age of this dinozone (rhaetian) is justified by plant fossils such as equisetitesarenaceus, scytophyllum...

In order to decipher the paleo-depositional environments, during Late Jurassic Early Eocene syn-rift stage, at margins of Ionian basin, two different areas with exposed long sequences have been selected, Kastos Island (external margin) and Araxos peninsula (internal margin), were examined by means microfacies analysis biostratigraphy. On Island, based on lithological sedimentological features, ...