The SEPM core workshop on deep-water clastic sediments was organized to provide participants with an opportunity to view cores from a variety of deep water depositional settings and to demonstrate the application of process sedimentology in the interpretation of depositional enviroments from the study of cores and associated subsurface data. The studies assembled for presentation in the workshop have dealt with sedimentary sequences which have been interpreted as having formed by deposition of non-calcareous, clastic sediment in relatively deep water (generally slope basins and greater depths). These studies also have been concerned principally with coarser deep-water sediments (usually fine-grained sandstone or coarser) of such stratigraphic sequences because of their potential as hydrocarbon reservoirs with primary and (or) diagenetically modified inter-granular porosity and permeability. Obviously those coarser parts of such deep-water sequences are anomalous in that they represent transport and deposition by processes that did not operate most of the time in the overall relatively quiet depositional settings. The probable processes of transport and deposition of such anomalous coarse clastic sediment, and overall models for dispersion and accumulation of such sediment, therefore have been considered in some detail in the studies included in the core workshop. However, this is not a course on sedimentary mechanics; it is a course in comparative stratigraphic and sedimentologic analysis.

Six core sequences, which have been the subject of detailed sedimentological study, will be on display during the core Workshop. Two studies pertain to deep-water, Upper Cretaceous sandstones (mainly the Winters Sandstone) of the Sacramento Valley