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Sedimentation in Continental Rifts: SEPM Special Publication No. 73

¹ Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bergen, Allégt. 41, 5007 Bergen, Norway

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SEDIMENTATION IN CONTINENTAL RIFTS: SEPM SPECIAL PUBLICATION NO. 73

Robin W. Renaut and Gail M. Ashley (Eds.), 2002, Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), Tulsa, USA, 334 p. (Hardcover, SEPM members US $100.00, non-member US $140.00) ISBN: 1-56576-082-4.

A good deal of what we know about the evolution of Earth's terrestrial environments is due to the preservation of thick sequences of continental sedimentary and volcanic rocks in rift basins. Some of these also happen to contain major hydrocarbon reserves, and in Africa, at least, rift deposits contain by far the most important early record of human origins. In recent years it also has become increasingly apparent that large, long-lived rift lakes are centers of exceptional biodiversity, the causes of which are still far from clear. For these reasons, rifts have been relatively well served in the literature with a number of notable specialist volumes aimed at both the geological and paleoanthropological communities appearing during the last two decades (e.g., Frostick et al., 1986; Manspeizer, 1988; Lambiase, 1995; Morley, 1999). With the addition of a number of other works where continental rifts are given prominent coverage (e.g., Katz, 1990; Johnson and Odada, 1996; Lehman, 1998; Odada and Olago, 2002), the casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that there is not much new to say, certainly not enough to fill 300-plus pages in a large-format book. Happily they would be wrong, and even if the idea for the present volume is the outcome of an apparently casual evening conversation on the shores of one the African rift lakes, the editors, Robin Renaut and Gail Ashley, have succeeded in bringing together a number of valuable new studies from modern and ancient rifts. Given that both editors have devoted a fair amount of their research careers to Africa, it is not surprising that the East . . . [Full Text of this Article]