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  1. Introduction

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Transcript

- [Voiceover] Okay, alright so what's the purpose in all this? This is a topic that we have gotten very deep in into sedimentology in the recent years. And we've really gotten into this notion of tryin' to ask ourselves a basic question. The sediment that we see in a basin, where do we see it? Where do we actually see this sediment show, see this sediment coming from? How do we see it getting into the basin? How much is actually in motion? So, with any given fluvial system, you know that there's going to be a source. All this area where the sediment is being generated, largely by erosion and then the sediment's gonna be moving to a sink. That's gonna be all the places where the sediment is being deposited and so of course in the rock record we only see the sink. We will see the source often times as an unconformity or some kind of erosion surface but not really as a surface that actually leaves us a lot of sediment. So what we have then is is we have a situation where the source is poorly preserved, the sink is pretty well preserved and we spend most of our time studyin' the sink. But if we wanna understand how that sediment got there, we have to be able to backtrack that sediment to the source and figure out what was going on in the source area and how much sediment was being generated there. We will start with a couple assumptions. First off, we assume that the source, the sediment budget is gonna be equal to the sink, the reservoir, which is gonna ultimately be our reservoir potential. So the total volume of sediment comin' outta the source should be equal to the ultimate amount that ends up in the sink, somewhere in some sink.