The Michigan Basin is a classic intracratonic basin that has played a significant role in the fundamental understanding of geological processes in such basins, and has been an important resource for oil and gas, economic minerals, groundwater, and coal. Despite the classic nature of the Michigan Basin, there has not been a "special volume" dedicated to the basin in nearly 25 years. Since that time, new advancements in the geological sciences, particularly the utilization of high-resolution sequence stratigraphy and three-dimensional geostatistical modeling, have led to a new and more comprehensive understanding of the Paleozoic sedimentary packages of the Michigan Basin. This volume provides significant new insights of the Michigan Basin to both academic and applied geoscientists; it includes papers that discuss various aspects of the sedimentology and stratigraphy of key units within the basin, as well as papers that analyze the diverse distribution of natural resources present in this basin.
The Early Palaeozoic was a critical interval in the evolution of marine life on our planet. Through a window of some 120 million years, the Cambrian Explosion, Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, End Ordovician Extinction and the subsequent Silurian Recovery established a steep trajectory of increasing marine biodiversity that started in the Late Proterozoic and continued into the Devonian. Biogeography is a key property of virtually all organisms; their distributional ranges, mapped out on a mosaic of changing palaeogeography, have played important roles in modulating the diversity and evolution of marine life. This Memoir first introduces the content, some of the concepts involved in describing and interpreting palaeobiogeography, and the changing Early Palaeozoic geography is illustrated through a series of time slices. The subsequent 26 chapters, compiled by some 130 authors from over 20 countries, describe and analyse distributional and in many cases diversity data for all the major biotic groups plotted on current palaeogeographic maps. Nearly a quarter of a century after the publication of the ‘Green Book’ (Geological Society, London, Memoir12, edited by McKerrow and Scotese), improved stratigraphic and taxonomic data together with more accurate, digitized palaeogeographic maps, have confirmed the central role of palaeobiogeography in understanding the evolution of Early Palaeozoic ecosystems and their biotas.