CHAPTER 5

DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS AND FACIES MODEL

We tum now to the study of continental or terrestrial depositional systems. Geologists
recognize four major kinds of continental environments: fluvial (alluvial fans and rivers),
desert, lacustrine (lake), and glacial. Although treated in this book as separate depositional
systems, similar kinds of sediments can be generated in more than one of these environments.
For example, eolian (windblown) sediments can accumulate both in desert environments and
in some parts of glacial environments. Lacustrine sediments form in lakes in any
environment, including deserts and glacial settings. Fluvial sediments are deposited mainly in
river systems of humid regions, but they are generated also in rivers within desert areas and
glacial environments. Facies deposited in continental environments are dominantly
siliciclastic sediments characterized by general scarcity of fossils and complete absence of
marine fossils. Nonsiliciclastic sediments such as freshwater limestones and evaporites occur
also in continental environments, but they are distinctly subordinate to siliciclastic deposits.
Continental sedimentary rocks are less abundant overall than are marine and marginal marine
sediments, but they nonetheless form an important part of the geologic record in some areas.
Tertiary fluvial sediments of the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains region of the United States,
Jurassic eolian sandstones of the Colorado Plateau, Tertiary lacustrine sediments (Green
River Formation) of Wyoming and Colorado, and the late Paleozoic glacial deposits of South
Africa and other parts of ancient Gondwanaland are all examples of continental deposits.
Some terrestrial sediments have economic significance. They may contain important
quantities of natural gas and petroleum, coal, oil shale, and uranium. We now examine, in
turn, each of the major continental environments.
Sediments accumulate in a wide range of settings that can be defined in terms of their
geomorphology, such as rivers, lakes, coasts, shallow seas, and so on. The physical, chemical
and biological processes that shape and characterise those environments are well known
through studies of physical geography and ecology. Those same processes determine the
character of the sediment deposited in these settings. A fundamental part of sedimentology is
the interpretation of sedimentary rocks in terms of the transport and depositional processes
and then determining the environment in which they were deposited. In doing so a
sedimentologist attempts to establish the conditions on the surface of the Earth at different
times in different places and hence build up a picture of the history of the surface of the
planet.

a) Facies
The term facies is widely used in geology, particularly in the study of sedimentology
in which sedimentary facies refers to the sum of the characteristics of a sedimentary unit
(Middleton 1973). These characteristics include the dimensions, sedimentary structures, grain
sizes and types, colour and biogenic content of the sedimentary rock. An example would be
crossbedded medium sandstone: this would be a rock consisting mainly of sand grains of
medium grade, exhibiting cross-bedding as the primary sedimentary structure. Not all aspects
of the rock are necessarily indicated in the facies name and in other instances it may be
important to emphasise different characteristics. In other situations the facies name for a very
similar rock might be red, micaceous sandstone if the colour and grain types were
considered to be more important than the grain size and sedimentary structures. The full
range of the characteristics of a rock would be given in the facies description that would form
part of any study of sedimentary rocks.
If the description is confined to the physical and chemical characteristics of a rock this
is referred to as the lithofacies. In cases where the observations concentrate on the fauna and
flora present, this is termed a biofacies description, and a study that focuses on the trace
fossils in the rock would be a description of the ichnofacies. As an example a single rock unit
may be described in terms of its lithofacies as a grey bioclastic packstone, as having a
biofacies of echinoid and crinoids and with a Cruziana ichnofacies: the sum of these and
other characteristics would constitute the sedimentary facies.

Facies analysis
The facies concept is not just a convenient means of describing rocks and grouping

sedimentary rocks seen in the field, it also forms the basis for facies analysis, a rigorous,
scientific approach to the interpretation of strata (Anderton 1985; Reading & Levell 1996;
Walker 1992; 2006). The lithofacies characteristics are determined by the physical and
chemical processes of transport and deposition of the sediments and the biofacies and
ichnofacies provide information about the palaeoecology during and after deposition. By
interpreting the sediment in terms of the physical, chemical and ecological conditions at the
time of deposition it becomes possible to reconstruct palaeoenvironments, i.e. environments
of the past.

The reconstruction of past sedimentary environments through facies analysis can

sometimes be a very simple exercise, but on other occasions it may require a complex
consideration of many factors before a tentative deduction can be made. It is a
straightforward process where the rock has characteristics that are unique to a particular
environment. As far as we know hermatypic corals have only ever grown in shallow, clear
and fairly warm seawater: the presence of these fossil corals in life position in a sedimentary
rock may therefore be used to indicate that the sediments were deposited in shallow, clear,
warm, seawater. The analysis is more complicated if the sediments are the products of
processes that can occur in a range of settings. For example, crossbedded sandstone can form
during deposition in deserts, in rivers, deltas, lakes, beaches and shallow seas: a crossbedded sandstone lithofacies would therefore not provide us with an indicator of a specific
environment.
Interpretation of facies should be objective and based only on the recognition of the
processes that formed the beds. So, from the presence of symmetrical ripple structures in a
fine sandstone it can be deduced that the bed was formed under shallow water with wind over
the surface of the water creating waves that stirred the sand to form symmetrical wave
ripples. The shallow water interpretation is made because wave ripples do not form in deep
water but the presence of ripples alone does not indicate whether the water was in a lake,
lagoon or shallow-marine shelf environment. The facies should therefore be referred to as
symmetrically rippled sandstone or perhaps wave rippled sandstone, but not lacustrine
sandstone because further information is required before that interpretation can be made.

c) Facies associations
The characteristics of an environment are determined by the combination of processes
which occur there. A lagoon, for example, is an area of low energy, shallow water with
periodic influxes of sand from the sea, and is a specific ecological niche where only certain
organisms live due to enhanced or reduced salinity. The facies produced by these processes
will be muds deposited from standing water, sands with wave ripples formed by wind over
shallow water and a biofacies of restricted fauna. These different facies form a facies
association that reflects the depositional environment (Collinson 1969; Reading & Levell
1996). When a succession of beds are analysed in this way, it is usually evident that there are
patterns in the distribution of facies. For example, on Fig. 5.12, do beds of the bioturbated
mudstone occur more commonly with (above or below) the laminated siltstone or the
wave rippled medium sandstone? Which of these three occurs with the coal facies? When
attempting to establish associations of facies it is useful to bear in mind the processes of
formation of each. Of the four examples of facies just mentioned the bioturbated mudstone
and the wave rippled medium sandstone both probably represent deposition in a
subaqueous, possibly marine, environment whereas medium sandstone with rootlets and
coal would both have formed in a subaerial setting. Two facies associations may therefore
be established if, as would be expected, the pair of subaqueously deposited facies tend to
occur together, as do the pair of subaerially formed facies.
The procedure of facies analysis therefore can be thought of as a two-stage process.
First, there is the recognition of facies that can be interpreted in terms of processes. Second,
the facies are grouped into facies associations that reflect combinations of processes and
therefore environments of deposition (Fig. 5.12). The temporal and spatial relationships
between depositional facies as observed in the present day and recorded in sedimentary rocks
were recognised by Walther (1894). Walthers Law can be simply summarised as stating that
if one facies is found superimposed on another without a break in a stratigraphic succession
those two facies would have been deposited adjacent to each other at any one time. This
means that sandstone beds formed in a desert by aeolian dunes might be expected to be found
over or under layers of evaporates deposited in an ephemeral desert lake because these
deposits may be found adjacent to each other in a desert environment (Fig. 5.13). However, it
would be surprising to find sandstones formed in a desert setting overlain by mudstones
deposited in deep seas: if such is found, it would indicate that there was a break in the

stratigraphic succession, i.e. an unconformity representing a period of time when erosion

occurred and/or sea level changed (2.3).

A graphic sedimentary log with facies information added. The names for facies are usually
descriptive. Facies codes are most useful where they are an abbreviation of the facies
description. The use of columns for each facies allows for trends and patterns in facies and
associations to be readily recognised.

Facies sequences/successions
A facies sequence or facies succession is a facies association in which the facies occur in a
particular order (Reading & Levell 1996). They occur when there is a repetition of a series of
processes as a response to regular changes in conditions. If, for example, a bioclastic
wackestone facies is always overlain by a bioclastic packstone facies, which is in turn always
overlain by a bioclastic grainstone (Fig. 5.12), these three facies may be considered to be a
facies sequence. Such a pattern may result from repeated shallowing-up due to deposition on
shoals of bioclastic sands and muds in a shallow marine environment (Chapter 14).
Recognition of patterns of facies can be on the basis of visual inspection of graphic
sedimentary logs or by using a statistical approach to determining the order in which facies
occur in a succession, such as a Markov analysis (Swan & Sandilands 1995; Waltham 2000).
This technique requires a transition grid to be set up with all the facies along both the
horizontal and vertical axis of a table: each time a transition occurs from one facies to another
(e.g. from bioclastic wackestone to bioclastic packstone facies) in a vertical succession this is
entered on to the grid. Facies sequences/sucessions show up as higher than average
transitions from one facies to another.

Facies names and facies codes

Once facies have been defined then they are given a name. There are no rules for
naming facies, but it makes sense to use names that are more-or-less descriptive, such as
bioturbated mudstone, trough crossbedded sandstone or foraminiferal wackestone. This
is preferable to Facies A, Facies B, Facies C, and so on, because these letters provide no
clue as to the nature of the facies. A compromise has to be reached between having a name
that adequately describes the facies but which is not too cumbersome. A general rule would
be to provide sufficient adjectives to distinguish the facies from each other but no more. For
example, mudstone facies is perfectly adequate if only one mudrock facies is recognised in
the succession. On the other hand, the distinction between trough crossbedded coarse
sandstone facies and planar crossbedded medium sandstone facies may be important in the
analysis of successions of shallowmarine sandstone. Facies schemes are therefore variable,
with definitions and names depending on the circumstances demanded by the rocks being
examined.

The names for facies should normally be purely descriptive but it is quite acceptable
to refer to facies associations in terms of the interpreted environment of deposition. An
association of facies such as symmetrically rippled fine sandstone, black laminated
mudstone and grey graded siltstone may have been interpreted as having been deposited in
a lake on the basis of the facies characteristics, and perhaps some biofacies information
indicating that the fauna are freshwater. This association of facies may therefore be referred
to as a lacustrine facies association and be distinguished from other continental facies
associations deposited in river channels (fluvial channel facies association) and as overbank
deposits (floodplain facies association).
It can be convenient to have shortened versions of the facies names, for example for
annotating sedimentary logs (Fig. 5.12). Miall (1978) suggested a scheme of letter codes for
fluvial sediments that can be adapted for any type of deposit. In this scheme the first letter
indicates the grain size (S for sand, G for gravel, for example), and one or two suffix
letters to reflect other features such as sedimentary structures: Sxl is crosslaminated
sandstone, for example. There are no rules for the code letters used, and there are many
variants on this theme (some workers use the letter Z for silts, for example) including
similar schemes for carbonate rocks based on the Dunham classification (3.1.6). As a general
guideline it is best to develop a system that is consistent, with all sandstone facies starting
with the letter S for example, and which uses abbreviations that can be readily interpreted.
There is an additional graphical scheme for displaying facies on sedimentary logs
(Fig. 5.12): columns alongside the log are used for each facies to indicatetheir vertical extent.
An advantage of this form of presentation is that if the order of the columns is chosen
carefully, for example with more shallow marine to the left and deeper marine on the right for
shelf environments, trends through time can be identified on the logs.

SUMMARY: FACIES AND

ENVIRONMENTS
An objective, scientific approach is essential for successful facies analysis. A succession of
sedimentary strata should be first described in terms of the lithofacies (and sometimes
biofacies and ichnofacies) present, at which stage interpretations of the processes of

deposition can be made. The facies can then be grouped into lithofacies associations which
can be interpreted in terms of depositional environments on the basis of the combinations of
physical, chemical and biological processes that have been identified from analysis of the
facies. There are facies associations and sequences that commonly occur in particular
environments and these are illustrated in the following chapters as typical of these
environments. However, there is a danger of making mistakes by pigeonholing, that is,
trying to match a succession of rocks to a particular facies model. Although general
characteristics usually give a good clue to the depositional environment, small details can be
vital and must not be overlooked.