1982 SEPM PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: EPISODIC SEDIMENTATION—HOW NORMAL IS AVERAGE? HOW RARE IS RARE? DOES IT MATTER?! ROBERT H. DOTT, JR. Department of Geology and Geophysies University of Wisconsin ‘Madison, Wisconsin $3706 AAusteacr: Do sedimentary rocks record mainly average, coatiauous,dayio-dy processes or relatively rae, largesmapntude ones separated by long aondepostonlinervas?Suble legacies from Lelian un. formiartanisem may stl impose a subeoncious abhorrence of unigue events, dscorinutss, and large deviations from “verge” magnituées. Wheve repeated sharp changes of sedimeniaen are inescapable erotic ejcles ae commonly isvoked o perere uniform, orderly variations from some supposed ot The sedimentary record rarely reflects Such uniformity, however, a sedimenologss have praduly Fe Magnitde versus frequency of procescs has long teen debated in geomorphology but has received less auenton in secimentlogy. Recurrence interval, recovery time, abd preservation pexenil ar rial fe tor for evaluating their sgncance forte sedimentary record. Large-magnitue processes, which rp. ‘eset postive deviates from the noem and are rare oa the human time-scale, mist be sigaiiant over {sologc time, But how significant? Could ot everyday processes have obliterated mich of the evidence? Food deposits have vlaively low preservation petntal because they le above base level. Maine geavel layers dispersed by abnormal waves have greater preservation potetial because most ordinary processes sre not competent to modify thers. Sandy or aly deposits formed by Inge waves sod displaying either hummocky cross-statiiaton or graded ding Rae & modetae preservation potent, espe) If 00 (hick for horowing animal to hemogenize them ‘Torbicites, which provide exceptional records of ep toxic, have excell preservation pocal becuse thy le well below base lve. Many tedng planes sre important records of episdicy. to some are races of enon, others of ndepeniion These represent negative deviations from average process magnitudes, "The sedimentolopical mporance of rae events dificdh to assess Decase the record of such events say be very suble. This capeially tre if «deposit has been throughly bioturbaied or ifthe record ofan event simply an erosional surface, It has now become possible to evaluate quantiaively ancient ‘pivodc sedimentation ising modem-process ates ay well ae ffinod brosttigrphic and isotopic dating T'predicr that such evaluation wil neste revision of cur favorite depositional models, which have become so imporart for expiration as well a fr research How normal is any so-called average con dition? How rare are so-called rare events? Do such questions really matter with regard to what is preserved in the sedimentary record? If abnormal events leave litle recognizable record, then from a stratigraphic point of view, the fuss may be litte more than a tempest in a teapot. This essay explores these questions. For the past 16 years, I have lived in a re- habilitated stone quarry, which contains the Cambro-Ordovician boundary somewhere within it. Cambrian sandstone from the quarry was first used over a century ago for many "Modified slighty from the 1982 SEPM President Ades presented orally at Calgary, Alber early buildings in the city of Madison, Wis- consin, including the original edifices on the University of Wisconsin campus. The old quarry face in our backyard has not changed noticeably during our 16-year residence, but 8 Jot has been going on nonetheless. My wife and I have seen five little Dots before our eyes grow rapidly and continuously into adulthood ‘There also have been many changes of season, which likewise were continuous and, for the most part, gradual. As | sip my morning coffee and contemplate my cliff, however, | am con- stantly haunted by whether the ancient strata ‘out back were deposited as continuously as children grow and seasons change or whether every bedding plane out there represents some kind of break in deposition. Could such breaks actually account for more total time than the preserved rocks? Jou of SeDmenTaRY PETROLOGY. Vou. 53. No. 1, Mane 1983, ». 0005-0023, Copy © 1983, Te Society of Economie Paeoribiogiss and Mineralogist 00224872/83/00S°.0008/503.00,6 ROBERT H. DOTT. JR. DOTT-YARO COLUMN co BAECGTED stHOMATOUTE Fic, 1—Columnar section of Cemibro-Ordovician sandstones and. dolomiter exposed at DuRose Terrace ‘Maaison, Wisconsin. See text for notable episod fea ‘A.close examination of my cliff reveals sev- eral examples of abrupt changes of deposition (Fig. 1). First, there is a subtle 1-cm-thick layer of coarse Sandstone within a much thicker imerval of medium- to fine-grained quanz sandstone. Second, there is a prominent 0.5- thick stromatolitic marker bed that can be rec- ognized over an area of at least a few square kilometers. Its upper half has broken and tilted stromatolite fragments embedded in a quartz sandstone matrix. Third, there are several lay: ers of fine dolomitic intraclast conglomerates. Fourth, there are several sharp boundaries be- ‘ween quartz sandstone and oolitic dolomite, and finally, some of the sandstone is intensely bioturbated Whereas other is unburrowed. Many of these features seem best explained by re- peated but intermittent violence, such as bat- tering of a very shallow marine environment by unusual storm waves. Such phenomena, which are commonplace in many other rock sequences, present the fundamental issue of this essay. Is the sedimentary record mainly ‘one of ordinary day-to-day processes that acted uniformly through time, or does it record ‘mostly extraordinary processes that acted spas- modically? In other words, is the record mostly continuous or mostly episodic? Metaphorically speaking, is it more like a solid layer cake or like Swiss cheese? SOME PHILOSOPHIC CONSIDERATIONS I have jong felt that, more than we realize, our pet doctrine of uniformitarianism—even a ‘modern version thereof under whatever rubric— casts subtle constraints upon our think- ing. For example, there is an instinctive abhorrence of unique events, and continuity is assumed first rather than discontinuity. We are strongly biased toward average conditions, which in more elegant terms we may call dy- namic equilibrium. This is especially true for studies of modern environments, with the ex- ception of several investigations of hurricanes. Where change is inescapable, we tend to think first of gradual rather than spasmodic change. When the sedimentologist is confronted with many obvious alternations of lithologies, there is a strong tendency to infer cyclicity and to speculate about periodic causes. The question of eyclic versus nonperiodic episodes is the subject of an entire recent book (Einsele and Seilacher, 1982). Cyclicity, I submit, is itself but a special subtle form of uniformity—that is, uniform change with uniform deviations from the norm, and with uniform repetition rates. There is a great danger here that we im- pose more order upon nature than actually ex- ists. Such danger was underscored poignantly by Edward Zelier’s production of close fac similes of Pennsylvanian cyclothems by using the Lawrence, Kansas, telephone directory as a random-numbers tabie to generate synthetic vertical sections composed of three lithologic ‘components (Zeller, 1964). Demonstration of true cyclicity requires a rigorous test such as Markov or spectral analysis (see Schwar- zacher, 1975, and Carr, 1982). The continuous layer-cake view of the sed- imentary record has been challenged before. Derek Ager (1980), for example, sees the rec ord as “a lot of holes tied together with sed- iment” (p. 35) and geologic history as “long periods of boredom and brief periods of ter- ror” (p. 106-107). Other authors. who have ‘waxed eloquently about the importance of rare ‘or low-probability events include G. G. Simp- son, who years ago (1952) noted that, on the geologic scale of time, that which seems im- possible by human standards becomes possi- ble, and the improbable becomes inevitable. P. E, Gretener in 1967 quantified the proba- bility of rare events. In Figure 2, which is adapted from Gretener, we can see from the X= L curve that if there is a 60-percent chanceEPISODIC SEDIMENTATION 7 PROBABILITY OF X EVENTS IN nYEARS NUMBER YEARS In) x PROBABILITY OF EVENT IN ONE YEAR (Fp) Be. 2.—Probabilty (pq) of a rare event 10 occur at least cies inn years 8 the probability that the event wll ake place ina single year. (Simplified from Grete- ter, 1967. Fig. 1 fof one event in I year, then there is an 85 percent chance of that event occurring once in 2 years, and a virtual certainty (98%) of one such event within a 4-year span. By adjusting the horizontal scale of this graph, as Gretener did, we also could determine that, for a much rarer event with a one-in-a-million chance of ‘occurring once in I year, there is nonetheless near certainty of five such events in 10 million years. Questions about the role of rare events and of the incompleteness of the geologic record have received considerable attention in recent years in such fields as geomorphology, as il- iusirated by the 100-year flood concept, and in evolutionary paleontology, as illustrated by the theory of punctuated equilibrium. In stra- tigraphy, there is an even longer history of studies pointing to widely varying accumula- tion rates and of attempts to explain such va ations. Many such studies have derived from repeated demonstrations of disparity between known modem depositional rates and ancient ‘apparent accumulation rates, Barrell noted this disparity as early as 1917, and he inferred that breaks represented by bedding-plane diastems with probable time values of years to decades rust characterize practically all. stratigraphic successions. The most recent study of this sort is an elegant quantitative analysis of accumu- lation rates and incompleteness by Sadler (1981). My colleague, Charles W. Byers, has argued that stratigraphers now must contend with discontinuity on an even broader front, ranging from Barrell's diastems to the tectonic juxtaposition of very different stratigraphic ter- ranes along suture zones (1982). Large-scale discontinuous stratigraphic pat- tems, such as transgressive or regressive successions, have received a great deal of at- tention over the years. The importance of such phenomena is now recognized formally in the widespread unconformity-bounded sequences of Sloss (1963), which are also familiar today as the intervals of the Vail sea-level curve (Vail and others, 197). Finally, Goodwin and Anderson (1980) have coined the term punc- tuated aggradational cycle to explain apparent episodic stratigraphic intervals of a lesser scale than the Sloss-Vail sequences, ‘Van Andel (1981) has editorialized on the implications of the degree of incompleteness of the geologic record based upon Sadler's re- sults, Sadler's data show an inverse relation between net accumulation rates and the time span for which they are determined. From this generalization, Van Andel infers. that most breaks must go unnoticed and that most gaps are unmarked, which leads us back to Ager's contention that the record is largely one of rare, short periods of terror separated by long periods of normal boredom. If the sedimentary record is really so incomplete and riddled with breaks like the holes in Swiss cheese, then we sedimentologists are presented with a. chal- lenge to find more of those breaks and to eval- uate them more fully in sedimentary terms This implies further that our depositional or facies models must be modified to accommo- date those many breaks (Fig. 3) It is apparent that episodes delineated by various sorts of discontinuities in the strati- ‘graphic record vary enormously in both spatial and temporal scale from millimeter-thick an- nual varves to Sloss-Vail sequences and clastic ‘wedges representing tens or hundreds of mil- lions of years. There is already much literature fon the larger scale stratigraphic phenomena and on long-term average accumulation rates, as noted above. Moreover, many analyses of accumulation rates have to equate thickness ‘with time in a simplistic way that is hardly jus- tified for most sedimentary sequences. There- fore, my discussion focuses upon rocks at the scale most familiar to sedimentologists, namely that of outcrops and cores, which reflect fre- quencies of episodes from seconds to a few million years. According to Sadler's and Van