Summary of Investigations


Book Description

A summary of recent scientific and economic results, accompanied by a list of publications released in fiscal 1963, a list of geologic and hydrologic investigations in progress, and a report on the status of topographic mapping.




Early Palaeozoic Biogeography and Palaeogeography


Book Description

The Early Palaeozoic was a critical interval in the evolution of marine life on our planet. Through a window of some 120 million years, the Cambrian Explosion, Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, End Ordovician Extinction and the subsequent Silurian Recovery established a steep trajectory of increasing marine biodiversity that started in the Late Proterozoic and continued into the Devonian. Biogeography is a key property of virtually all organisms; their distributional ranges, mapped out on a mosaic of changing palaeogeography, have played important roles in modulating the diversity and evolution of marine life. This Memoir first introduces the content, some of the concepts involved in describing and interpreting palaeobiogeography, and the changing Early Palaeozoic geography is illustrated through a series of time slices. The subsequent 26 chapters, compiled by some 130 authors from over 20 countries, describe and analyse distributional and in many cases diversity data for all the major biotic groups plotted on current palaeogeographic maps. Nearly a quarter of a century after the publication of the ‘Green Book’ (Geological Society, London, Memoir12, edited by McKerrow and Scotese), improved stratigraphic and taxonomic data together with more accurate, digitized palaeogeographic maps, have confirmed the central role of palaeobiogeography in understanding the evolution of Early Palaeozoic ecosystems and their biotas.







Miospores and Organic-walled Microphytoplankton of Devonian-Carboniferous Boundary Beds (Bakken Formation), Southern Saskatchewan


Book Description

Core samples obtained from five petroleum exploration wells in southern Saskatchewan provide the material basis for this first detailed palynological study of the subsurface Bakken Formation in the northern part of the intracratonic Williston Basin. The Bakken Formation is a holomarine unit that constitutes part of the organic-rich, predominantly black shale sedimentary sequence that accumulated around latest Devonian-earliest Carboniferous time in the Williston Basin and in the contiguous northern Rocky Mountains region of the Western Canada Basin. The Bakken is a distinctive stratigraphic marker because of its lithological consistency in toto and its three subunits, all of which were sampled for this investigation. The Bakken is economically important as a probable petroleum source (shale members) and because of its reservoir properties (arenaceous member).