The Juana Lopez Member of the Mancos Shale crops out along the southern edge of the Book Cliffs and dips north into the Uinta Basin of Utah, providing a natural laboratory in which to examine heterolithic deposits. We use core, outcrop, & geochemical data to elucidate the provenance of and sedimentary processes controlling organic matter & sediment delivery and preservation in these unique deposits.
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Several iterations of our depositional model for this system have been presented at GSA 2014 in Vancouver, CA and at GSA 2016 in Denver, CO and we are currently working on a manuscript, which is in review at Sedimentology.
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Transport processes resulting in heterolithic deposits are particularly unique in that the hydrodynamic setting of these systems can be elucidated by examining the coarser fraction of the deposits, as opposed to the difficulty of seeing these features in purely fine-grained deposits.