News and Ongoing

Conveners: Howard Feldman (Colorado State University), Bruce Ainsworth (Santos Ltd.), Luca Colombera (FRG-ERG-SMRG), Rebecca Caldwell (Chevron)

The SEPM Research Conference 2023: “Are Siliciclastic Parasequences Still Relevant?” took place in and around Green River, Utah, USA, on 9-12 October, 2023. It was a mixed-format conference with two field days and two conference talk days. There were forty-seven attendees in total, from 9 different countries (Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Italy, Norway, South Korea, Thailand, UK, USA), 17 universities and research institutes, 12 energy companies, and 4 independent consultants. The venue for the two conference days was the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River. Participants were treated to 26 talks on the themes of general concepts, Quaternary shorelines, ancient shorelines, parasequences in the fluvial-tidal transition and into non-marine strata, mudstone-dominated portions of parasequences, and modelling parasequences. The Thompson Canyon, Desert Member core was also available for the participants to inspect and discuss in the museum, as were core photos from the Floy Canyon and Price River cores (Desert Member and Panther Tongue, respectively). The fieldtrips and discussion encouraged detailed conversations on the current relevance of parasequences. Key takeaways from the discussions were: (i) parasequences are still very much relevant to today’s stratigraphers and sedimentologists for multiple pragmatic reasons including: representing one of the building blocks of stratigraphy, defining subsurface flow-units and vertical compartments, and being potentially recognisable across various datasets (outcrops, well logs, seismic); (ii) there is still no consensus on the actual definition and/or usage of a parasequence; it was recommended that authors of papers or presentations define upfront what definition of a parasequence they are using and if they are tying it to any temporal or hierarchical scale; (iii) an SEPM Special Publication pulling together the state-of-the-art on parasequences and their applications will be one of the outputs of the conference. The Special Publication will see the light in 2025.