Professor Kevin Taylor, University of Manchester

What can the mudstones of Robin Hood's Bay tell us about sedimentation, source rock character and properties of mudstones in general?

Mudstones make up greater than 70% of the sedimentary rock record, and in addition to providing fundamental insights into sedimentary processes through time, they can act as significant oil and gas source rocks, as reservoirs of oil and gas themselves (unconventional reservoirs) and have been considered as hosts for nuclear waste burial. Significant research over the last decade on these rocks has yielded new insights into their origin and variability, and their economic and societal attributes.

The Yorkshire Coast has a series of thick well-known mudstone successions (the Whitby Mudstone and Redcar Formations, and their internal members). Three of these successions - the Jet Rock, the Bituminous Shales, and the Redcar Mudstone Formation - have clear analogues in major, and economically important Mesozoic mudstone successions in the USA - the Eagleford Shale (Texas), the Haynesville-Bossier Shale (Louisiana-Texas) and the Mancos Shale (Utah-Colorado) . Although all these successions, in Yorkshire and the USA, were deposited in shallow marine shelfal environments, their contrasts in composition, textures and later burial are a function of the subtle differences in depositional process, sediment and organic input, and water composition to these systems.

In this talk I will present the major characteristics of these mudstone successions, through outcrop, core and thin section analysis, and explain the processes that led to their formation and current, and different, characteristics. I will also outline how research into these successions has realised a new understanding of mudstone depositional processes.