The Shallow-Marine Architecture Knowledge Store: A database for the characterization of shallow-marine and paralic depositional systems

The Shallow-Marine Architecture Knowledge Store (SMAKS) is a relational database devised for the storage of hard and soft data on the sedimentary architecture of ancient shallow-marine and paralic siliciclastic successions, and on the geomorphological organization of corresponding modern environments. The database allows incorporation of data from the published literature, which are uploaded to a common standard to ensure consistency in data definition. The database incorporates data on geological entities of varied nature and scale (i.e., surfaces, depositional tracts, architectural elements, sequence stratigraphic units, facies units, geomorphic elements), including attributes that characterize their type, geometry, spatial relations, hierarchical relations, and temporal significance. Furthermore, geological entities are assigned to depositional systems, or to parts thereof, that can be classified on multiple parameters (e.g., shelf width, delta catchment area) tied to metadata (e.g., data types, data sources). The SMAKS permits the quantitative characterization of modern and ancient shallow-marine and paralic clastic depositional systems. It aims to serves as a repository of analogue information for hydrocarbon-bearing successions, and as a research tool, applicable to aid the development of facies models or to assess the sensitivity of depositional systems to particular controlling factors, for example. To demonstrate the wide applicability of the database in fields of both fundamental and applied research, example database output is presented that (i) includes data from wave-, tide-, and fluvial-dominated shallow seas and sedimentary successions, and (ii) covers a wide depositional spectrum, from backshore to shelf-edge settings. The examples include information on the facies organization of different types of paralic sub-environments, on the hierarchical arrangement of architectural elements that form deltaic constructional units in Quaternary deltas, on the morphometry of modern and Quaternary tidal sand ridges, and on the geometry of parasequence-scale nearshore sandstone belts from the Upper Cretaceous of the Western Interior Seaway in Utah (USA).