The Sedimentary Record of Sea-Level

My first serious exposure to sequence stratigraphy was in a grad-uate seminar over 10 years ago. To be honest, it was pretty hard go-ing; I had to read papers many times over and often still was not sure that I fully understood them. For one thing, the jargon of sequence stratigraphy is remarkably dense (despite its usefulness once basic concepts are grasped). Also, many papers that are now regarded as canonical because they clarify certain theoretical or practical issues had not yet appeared or had only recently been published and had not yet been digested by the broader stratigraphic community (to say nothing of a very green graduate student). Despite the familiarity of many of the concepts, the fundamental connections were difficult to grasp and weave into an integrated whole. Nevertheless, reading about and discussing these ideas was exciting because, as they came together, I felt like I was learning something genuinely new (at least to me). Since that time, sequence stratigraphy has become a funda-mental part of my research as a paleontologist–to a large degree be-cause I still find the challenge of using these ideas exciting. From my personal point of view, I see sequence stratigraphy as fun-damentally related to paleontology: after all, it aims to understand rock in a temporal framework just as paleontology aims to under-stand past life in a temporal framework. This connection, hinted at very early by Cisne and Rabe (1978), was largely overlooked except by taphonomists (e.g., Kidwell, 1984). However, as paleontologists have begun seeing past the veil of jargon, the relevance of sequence stratig-raphy has become increasingly evident (e.g., Patzkowsky and Hol