AGU, madeleines, and the 5 earth science books (and articles) I can’t live without!

Marcel Proust famously wrote in the first volume of his early 20^th-century novel À la recherche du temps perdu (title translated as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time) about the involuntary memories triggered by eating a madeleine dipped in tea.  (This Proust memory passage even prompted my undergraduate college to rename its yearbook, The Madeleine!) A madeleine is a very small, cookie-size, sponge or génoise cake shaped like an elongated seashell; it can have an almond or lemon flavor. Although madeleines were a frequent purchase of mine at a Starbucks across from the Walter Washington Convention Center during the December 2018 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, DC, it was actually a talk about geodynamicist Donald Turcotte, in a session honoring the “Giants of Tectonophysics”, that got my mind rambling back to an infrequent but perennial thought of what are the five most important or essential earth science texts for me (including one by Turcotte), if I was limited to having just five. (The original thought long ago was the five books I would want if stuck on a desert isle, but really what would I need with academic reading with no office, lab, pencil… or food?!)

FIGURE 1: Madeleines and their baking pan. (From the Food Network, Canada.)

 

FIGURE 2: Four of my 5 most essential earth science texts (some with more than one edition), identified by the plethora of Post-Its.

  

Geodynamics: Applications of continuum physics to geologic problems by Donald Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, 1982, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 450 pages. (The volume that the AGU biographic talk on Turcotte brought to mind. It provides a calculus-based physics understanding of earth processes such as material flow, heat flow, fluid flow, flexure, brittle deformation. One could also say it is a mechanical engineering approach to geological processes, but on a huge scale in both length and duration. Doing the included problems cements understanding.)

Stach’s Textbook of Coal Petrology, 3rd. ed., by Stach, E., Mackowsky, M.-Th., Teichmüller, M., Taylor, G. H., Chandra, D.,Teichmüller, R., Murchison, D. G., and Zierke, F., 1982, Gebruder Borntraeger, Berlin, 535 pages, AND ITS SUCCESSOR, Taylor, G. H., Teichmüller, M., Davis, A., Diessel, C. F. K., Littke, R., Robert, P., 1998, Organic petrology: Gebrüder Borntraeger, Berlin, 704 pages. (These books are the bible(s) of coal, and later organic, petrology, the microscopic study of sedimentary organic matter, including formation of coal, macerals, utilization products. Stach’s 3^rd edition is what I originally learned on, but is a bit disordered since additions, over the 2^nd edition, were just tacked onto existing chapters or sections. Organic Petrology is an updated, cleaned-up revised version incorporating more on dispersed organic matter in sedimentary rocks, not just organic-matter-dominated coal.)

Petroleum formation and occurrence, 2nd. ed., by Bernard P. Tissot and Dietrich H. Welte, 1984, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 699 pages. (Served as the text for a petroleum geochemistry grad course I took; covers organic matter deposition, maturation and chemical evolution of kerogen and petroleum, migration, reservoirs, degradation.)

Sedimentary organic matter: organic facies and palynology by Richard V. Tyson, 1995, Chapman & Hall, London, 615 pages. (While the coal and organic petrology books focused on reflected-light microscopy, petrography in Tyson’s book is in transmitted light, as used in palynology. However, the value comes from the very encyclopedic coverage of particulate organic matter deposition, preservation, degradation, organic matter sources (land plant, algal), methods of study, and chemical analysis.)

Earth by Frank Press and Raymond Siever, 1986, W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, 656 pages. (Comprehensive text that is great prep for doctoral oral exams. A similar recommendation for exam prep (standard suggestion for grad students at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York) is How to Build a Habitable Planet, revised/updated 2012, Charles Langmuir and Wallace Broecker.)

What is the connection among these organic and geodynamics/tectonic tomes for me? Vitrinite reflectance, an organic diagenetic to very-low-grade-metamorphic indicator tool originally developed in coal petrology, can be used to model thermal history, determine paleotemperature and paleogeothermal gradient, causative heat flow processes (conductive vs. advective, transient vs. steady state), amount of any stratigraphic exhumation in the context of deformational and plate tectonic processes. All these aspects come under the umbrella of "sedimentary basin analysis".

Just by the way, scaling down from books, here are five articles that have been most influential or foundational for my research:

Tissot, B. P., Pelet, R., Ungerer, Ph., 1987, Thermal history of sedimentary basins, maturation indices, and kinetic of oil and gas generation*: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 71, p. 1445- 1466. (Although these authors had written previous articles on their earlier research, this well-illustrated presentation of organic maturation and petroleum generation as a series or distribution of first-order-rate reactions of increasing activation energy makes understanding this kinetic conceptual model very clear. IMHO, the publication of this article was the turning point in the popular acceptance of the distributed-activation-energy kinetic model over the earlier single-activation-energy-based Lopatin TTI model.)

Sweeney, J. J. and Burnham, A. K., 1990, Evaluation of a simple model of vitrinite reflectance based on chemical kinetics: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 74, p. 1559-70. (Based on the same kinetic concept of organic maturation as Tissot and others, this application specifically on vitrinite reflectance evolution is the basis of the maturation modeling I do for basin thermal history. There are several similar models now by other institutes or companies; this one is also referred to as the LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Lab) model.)

Person, M. and G. Garven, 1994, A sensitivity study of the driving forces on fluid flow during continental- rift basin evolution: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 106, p. 461-75. (At some point, I had put this volume of the GSA Bulletin aside on my home office floor, folded open to the start of this article for later reading. Subsequently forgot about it until working on some orals paper, or similar document, and literally tripped over the journal in a Eureka moment, re-discovering this paper on gravity-driven cross-basin fluid flow in rift basins and permeability control on resulting advective heat flow patterns. It explained the downhole vitrinite reflectance patterns I was seeing in my own rift-basin research. The authors applied large-scale basin fluid-flow modeling, previously used on foreland basins, to rift basins specifically.)

Dow, W.G., 1977, Kerogen studies and geological interpretations: Journal of Geochemical Exploration, v. 7, p. 79-99. (This article introduces using linear semi-log downhole vitrinite reflectance vs. depth profiles to determine amount of eroded section. A simple and elegant method, it has fewer assumptions, and, therefore, fewer possibilities for introduced error, than using thermal history modeling schemes to determine magnitude of exhumation.)

Pasley, M. A., Riley, G. W., Nummedal, D., 1993, Sequence stratigraphic significance of organic matter variations: example from the Upper Cretaceous Mancos shale of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, in Katz, B. J. and Pratt, L. M., eds., Source Rocks in a Sequence Stratigraphic Framework, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Studies in Geology, no. 37, p. 221-242. (Not as well-known as the other articles listed here, this paper explaining the pattern of allochthonous vs. autochthonous particulate organic-matter deposition (land plant vs. marine algal) in marine transgressive-regressive sequences is an important contribution to understanding the sedimentary processes behind observed marine organic-facies patterns. It importantly contributed to my own understanding of related processes governing organic-facies patterns I saw in rift basin transgressive-regressive lake cycles.)

SO, what are the most important or essential earth science texts or articles for YOUR career??