Highlights

Many successions of interbedded tide-influenced sandstone and marine shale include complex vertical and lateral facies patterns, and make prediction of lateral variability challenging.  Willis and Fitris describe a detailed study of core, log, and seismic data from a Miocene succession in Indonesia, that captures the nature of stratigraphic heterogeneity.  The results of this study challenge the notion that sharp-based tidal-influenced sandstone bodies are underlain by lowstand fluvial erosion surfaces and represent incised valley-fill deposits.  Instead, this succession is interpreted to reflect a mix of regressive, transgressive, and re-worked shelf deposits, but with trends that are constrained by the sequence stratigraphic framework.

Sequence stratigraphy of Miocene tide-influenced sandstones in the Minas field, Sumatra, Indonesia by Brian J. Willis and Faizil Fitris