Highlights—Islands in the Stream (with no Vegetation)

Interpretation of fluvial strata in continental basins is contingent upon recognizing stratal architectures and climate change signals from fluvial strata, and provide insights into understanding how fluvial sedimentation interacts with basin topography. These aspects are difficult to assess in the pre-Devonian fluvial rock record, because comparisons to models based on vegetated modern rivers may not be suitable. In this paper, Lowe and Arnott carefully describe the architecture of braided and ephemeral facies in the Cambro-Ordovician Potsdam Group in the Ottawa Embayment and Quebec Basin in northeastern North America. The contribution reveals pre-Devonian fluvial architectures and processes, and how they relate to global orbitally-forced climate changes in the Late Cambrian. These aspects of pre-Devonian fluvial sedimentology are important to the Joe Geologist because they provide a framework to make basin-wide time-significant stratigraphic correlations, and understand variations in stratal architectures with varying degrees of interaction with basement topography, potentially important for groundwater and oil migration, and discerning climate change during this critical period.

Composition and architecture of braided and sheetflood-dominated ephemeral fluvial strata in the Cambrian–Ordovician Potsdam Group: a case example of the morphodynamics of early Phanerozoic fluvial systems and climate change by David G. Lowe and R.W.C. Arnott