Preamble
The long history of interest in gravity-driven deep-water sedimentation is founded on early key work by Kuenen, Shepard, Bouma and others (link to Historical Review). Research in this field of sedimentary geology has recently accelerated. This is largely driven by the interest of the oil industry as their exploration on continental margins around the world has extended into increasingly deep water. Also parallel developments in seismic and seafloor imaging have provided fundamental new insights into the character and three-dimensional structure of deepwater deposits. Increasingly sophisticated laboratory and numerical simulations can now be used to replicate natural processes.

 Concurrently the shoreline, shelf and deep water settings. Deep-water systems are no longer viewed in isolation, but as an integral part of the margin response to up-dip accommodation and supply variations. These externally-forced changes provide a high-level framework in which to assess the behavior of successive gravity currents and the depositional architecture they build.

The new understanding of the processes and stratigraphy of deepwater systems is important to both the better prediction of sand occurrence during hydrocarbon exploration, and the assessment of the three-dimensional geometry and reservoir properties of the sandstones and interbedded non-reservoir facies during field appraisal and production.

Deepwater Clastic Systems Section Organization
This set of pages has two purposes and sections:

The first section provides a summary of key gen