Abstract

This book provides a comprehensive and critical summary of clay mineral literature that relates to geology and geologic processes, making it useful both as a reference book for geologists and as a text for the specialist.
The book encompasses the full scope of clay-shale geology. An introductory chapter provides basic background terminology and classification. This is followed by a relatively long chapter on the structure and composition of the various clay minerals. Chapter 3 provides an introduction to soil formation, chemical weathering, microbial alteration and the pedogenic formation of clay minerals. Chapters 4 and 5 cover the continental and marine transport, and deposition of clays. Both mechanisms and examples are presented, ranging from biodepositional to the nepheloid layer. Chapter 6 reviews data on the low to high temperature formation of clay minerals from marine volcanics, and the growth of authigenic clays in shallow marine, brackish, and evaporite environments. Chapter 7, Diagenesis Metamorphism, covers both burial diagenesis and the processes occurring during the conversion of shale to clay. Chapter 8 discusses the formation of authigenic-diagenetic formation of clays in sandstones. Chapter 9 describes the temperal distribution of clay minerals in North and South America, Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. The clay suites are related to factors such as continental drift, tectonics, climate and environment. The final brief chapter covers compaction, lithification and some general features of shales.
The book is liberally sprinkled with x-ray patterns, chemical analyses, and SEM and TEM pictures, in addition to hundreds of examples.
"Clays, Muds, and Shales" is a lifetime labor by a dedicated, creative, hard-working clay mineralogist, who has always had opinions and always expressed them freely. The book itself contains 820 pages, 78 tables, 325 figures, and over 1600 references.
Chapter 9, "Evolution of Physils and Continents," is the longest of the book, 142 pages, and is amazing in its scope - a review of physils on all the continents from the Pecambrian to the present, data permitting. In its scope, this chapter has no counterpart in texts about sandstones and carbonates.
The technical aspects of (Clays, Muds, and Shales) are rich with tables of chemical data and structural formulae, numerous stability diagrams, many scanning electron microscope photos, and some transmission electron microscope images. The author makes use of isotopic data and K-Ar dating of clay minerals, as one would expect from a clay mineralogist. In addition, many maps show the distribution of clay minerals in sedimentary basins, and graphs show their vertical variations downhole or along an estuary. In other words, the book is rich in case histories.
The text itself is well written and carefully edited.
What we have in (Clays, Muds, and Shales) is a remarkable one-man effort that spans most of argillaceous sediments and rocks, a book that represents a lifetime of dedicated, intense effort ....
The AAPG Bulletin