Convenors: Ben Kneller, Aberdeen; Ole Martinsen, Norsk Hydro; Bill McCaffrey, Leeds; Henry Posamentier, Anadarko Canada

Theme:
Deep marine clastic systems represent the planet's ultimate sediment sink. As such, they are susceptible to all the processes that govern sediment supply throughout the transport pathway, from uplift and erosion, through fluvial transport, shoreline transition, storage and remobilization, each affected by tectonics, climate and sea level. The deep marine system thus contains a record of these controls, albeit cryptic, in its distribution of sediment types and depositional architectures, which is more complete than that provided by any other depositional environment. Moreover, it extends into the distant geological past, providing a record of climate change on time scales two orders of magnitude greater than that of the Pleistocene, and including records of a very different Earth from that of today.

The continuing importance of hydrocarbon reservoirs hosted by deep marine clastic systems also demands an understanding of the interplay of these external controls in generating suites of architectures that can be predicted in the subsurface. Also existing oil and gas fields provide a wealth of stratigraphic and contextual information from which these controls can be elucidated.

The aim of the meeting is to promote cross-fertilization between workers on modern, subsurface and outcrop systems, and to highlight the application of concepts from climatology, the study of Quaternary variations in sediment flux and type in rivers and on shelves etc, by having keynote speakers from these 'outside' disciplines. These keynote speakers will be fully funded to attend. There will also be invited speakers from within the discipline - people who can address specific topics that the conveners particularly want to see addressed; their expenses would not be paid, but they would be allocated longer time slots.

The meeting is timely given the wealth of subsurface data now available (including high-quality industrial seismic), current source-to-sink initiatives in the geological community, and the continuing high level of interest in climate change. Also there remain enormous uncertainties in subsurface prediction that may be reduced by a better understanding of the stratigraphic response of both modern and ancient systems to external controls.

Keynotes:
1. Gerard Bond (Lamont-Doherty) - Quaternary climate cycles confirmed