Home | Session 4 | Shallow Marine Pg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Shallow Marine Environments and Paleoenvironments: Reefs, Beaches and Basins
Presented
by Carol Tang
California Academy of Sciences
Frameworks
Framework reefs are the dominant reefs today and it is where organisms (corals today) build the reef with their skeletons.
These reefs can form large structures. Your textbook does a good job of detailing the creation of these coral atolls, which were originally built around islands. (Exploring Earth Science, Second Edition, Prentice-Hall, 1999, p. 222) But as the island sinks, the corals continue to grow until the original land mass has disappeared as in this case.
Carbonate muds and sands (biologically-mediated)
But carbonates include carbonate fine-grained materials too. For example, sea grasses can act to hold down fine-grained carbonates so that they do not get moved away by waves. Again, it's an interaction between organisms and geology.
updated April 1, 2002
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