Determine the percentage of clay (including micaceous hash finer than

coarse-silt size, .03mm). a. If the rock has over 5 percent clay, it is

IMMATURE. b. If the rock contains less than 5 percent clay, go to (2). 100 In
general, immature rocks have very little original visible pore space, and little
chemical cement; submature (and higher) rocks have the pores either open
or filled with chemical cements like quartz or calcite. 2. Determine the
sorting of the rock. a. If it is not well sorted with a over 0.5$ (mm diameter
ratio over 2.0), it is SUBMATURE. b. If it is well sorted with a under 0.54, go
to (3). The sorting borderline between submature and mature is depicted in
the bottom figure on the next page, which represents a set of spheres with a
phi standard deviation of exactly 0.5. Compare your sample with the figure
to see if it is well enough sorted to be mature. 3. Determine the roundness
of quartz grains of sand size. a. If the grains are subangular to very angular
on Powers scale (p under 3.0, it is MATURE. b. If the grains are subround to
well rounded (p over 3.0) it is SUPERMATURE. The figure below represents a
sand with roundness of 3.0, the borderline between mature and
supermature.
Unfortunately, it is a common tendency to overestimate the standard
deviation values of well-sorted sands. Hence these values can be more
conveniently obtained by comparison with the set of standard deviation
comparison images, previous page. In determining maturity, there is one
exception to the numerical limit a = .5$ advocated above. Some sands that
would be considered poorly sorted as whole, consist of two distinct modes
which are in themselves well sorted. These examples should be called
bimodal mature or bimodal supermature (depending on the rounding),
considering them to be genetically well sorted for the purpose of maturity
terminology, although numerically they would not be. Many of these are
desert deflation products (Folk, I968 XXIII Int. Geol. Congress, Praha
Cedskoslovensko). Textural Inversions occur when well-sorted or wellrounded grains occur in a clay matrix, or when a sediment is composed of
poorly sorted but well-rounded grains. These are very valuable in
interpretation because they indicate mixing of the products of two energy
levels. Sorted or rounded sand grains in a clay matrix often occur in lagoons
behind barrier bars, where the sand grains are blown off the beaches or
dunes (where they achieved their sorting and rounding) and mixed with the
lagoonal clays by storm winds or waves. Final deposition occurs in a low
energy environment, therefore texturally inverted sediments are classified
as to the lowest stage of maturity present, which normally represents the
latest environment. Textural inversions also occur when older sandstones
are eroded to produce a new sediment, for example poorly sorted river
sands made up of rounded grains from outcrops of much older sandstone.
Some textural inversions may be caused by burrowing organisms; for
example, pelecypods or worms could burrow through a nicely interlayered
series of well-sorted sands and interbedded clean clays, and make the
whole thing into a homogeneous mass of clayey, immature sand. But the
presence of these immature sands would indicate that the final environment

was one of low energy, or else the currents would have re-sorted the
material after burrowing.
The range of maturity encountered in natural environments is estimated in
the following figure, thickness of the lenses corresponding to the most
common stages of maturity present in each environment. The next figure
attempts to show typical grain size for the various sedimentary
environments. It is important to realize that the maturity rating of an
environment depends on how much mechanical energy is exerted on a
sediment after it has been moved essentially to its final resting place, by
currents and waves at the final site of deposition; it does not depend on the
energy expenditure required to move it from the 7 source area to the sr te of
final deposition. A flood or turbidity current, for example, may expend a
tremendous amount of energy while it is transporting sediment, but once
the sediment is dropped it is simply buried by more sediment and never
suffers any further sorting or winnowing; thus such sediments have low
maturity. Waves on a beach, on the contrary, sort and rework the sediment
continually as the tide goes in and out, or as storms and seasonal changes
chew up beach sediments and shift them repeatedly. Krynine has shown
that each sediment-modifying process operates at a certain optimum
energy level, and this philosophy is certainly true in concept of textural
maturity. Thus the amount of energy expended in modifying sediments must
be within certain limits; if it is too little, sorting and rounding do not operate
efficiently; if too much energy is exerted, the maturity,may be destroyed
(such as when a sudden storm destroys a well-sorted beach and mixes it
with lagoonal clays, or when a mountain cloudburst produces torrents that
fracture boulders that had become rounded under a more gentle stream
regimen). Thus sudden excess bursts of energy are often responsible for
textural inversion. It is a curious thing that the best rounded sands are
usually not too well sorted; this may mean that rounding operates best in
environments with energy levels that are too high for optimum sorting,
where currents, winds or waves are too vigorous and repeatedly mix up and
unsort previously sorted layers of sands. Tectonism and Textural Maturity.
It has been pointed out above that textural maturity is very largely the
result of the environment of deposition (beach, lagoon, floodplain, delta,
alluvial fan, etc.) Some workers, however, claim that textural maturity is a
direct function of tectonism: intense tectonic activity with rapidly subsiding
geosynclines yielding stratigraphic sections composed entirely of immature
sediments, mild tectonic instability (unstable shelves) giving all submature
sediments, stable conditions (stable shelves) producing nothing but mature
sediments, and periods of prolonged tectonic stability resulting in
supermature sediments. This is a gross oversimplification because (at least
in the lower three stages of maturity) environment of deposition exerts a
much greater control than tectonism on the sorting and rounding of
sediments. Thus a flood-plain or neritic sediment will probably contain just
as much clay if the depositional basin is sinking at the rate of one inch per
hundred years (violent subsidence), or one inch per ten thousand years
(stable shelf). Similarly, a beach sand may get just as well sorted if the

shore line stays at one position for one hundred years, as it would if the
shoreline was stabilized for a hundred thousand years. For example, Texas
Gulf coast beaches (and their buried Tertiary equivalents) have superb
sorting values, with a in the range of 0.25-0.35~); yet no one would call this
rapidly subsiding geosynclinal region a stable shelf. The reason for that is
that the geologic processes of sorting and winnowing take place almost
instantaneously when compared with the geologic time scale-- sands can be
sorted pretty well, and clay removed, by a few swishes of a miners pan !
Thus it does not require any long period of crustal stability to produce wellwinnowed or well-sorted sediments. 106 The role of tectonic stability in
producing supermature sediments is less clear. Certainly those times in
earths history that were characterized by very stable and quiescent
conditions (upper Cambrian, Ordovician, and Cretaceous for example) have
produced abundant supermature sediments; and relatively stable areas of
the earths crust have produced supermature sediments throughout much of
geologic time (Canadian and Australian shield sediments, for example). But
contrary evidence shows that supermature sands can be produced in one
cycle, and in very brief geologic time if the environment is potent enough.
This happens in the Ellenburger of West Texas, where beds of supermature
sand alternate repeatedly with angular sands of the same grain size, all
coming from the same primary granitic-gneissic source area. The identical
thing happens in the Silurian of West Virginia, where quartz sands from the
same metamorphic and vein source may be very well rounded in one bed
and subangular in a bed two feet higher. If periods of tectonic stability are
called upon to explain these sequences, then those stable periods must
have lasted only a small fraction of a gologic period. In the opinion of this
writer, then, these rapid alternations are caused by shifts in environment
(beach or dune vs. fluvial or neritic, for example) and do not require any
prolonged stability of the crust. They probably would not form in a period of
such rapid shoreline shifts as we have had in the Pleistocene or Recent
(since very little rounding of sand-size grains is going on in present U.S.
ocean beaches), but might be formed during non-glacial times in places
where the environment was right. The beach-dune environment would have
to be relatively stationary at one place (or else sweep through the same
spot repeatedly) in order to produce high rounding, but the point is that it
need not be stabilized for more than a fraction of a geologic period.
Although the environment of deposition is apparently the immediate
controlling factor in textural maturity, the tectonic framework exercises an
indirect control by determining which environments shall be volumetrically
dominant and which environments shall be rare in a given region or
stratigraphic section. As Krynine has shown, the degree and type of tectonic
activity does determine a certain preferred (but not necessary) association
of source area lithology, relief, geomorphic processes, and rate of
subsidence of the depositional basin. These factors in turn integrate to
produce preferred associations of environments, because the rate of influx
of detritus into a basin, combined with the rate of subsidence of that basin,
determines the quantitative distribution of the environments, e.g.,

proportion of continental to marine facies, or relative importance of deltaic

vs. each sediments. And these environments in turn control the textural
maturity. For example, in a tectonically active geosynclinal area sediment
deposition is rapid with buildup of extensive floodplains, aggrading river
channels, large deltas, and thick masses of neritic sediments, possibly in
part deposited by turbidity flows and submarine mudslides. In such a
tectonic framework, immature sediments will dominate because of the
prevalence of low-maturity environments in the region. But local beaches in
this complex, although volumetrically minor, may contain extremely wellsorted sediments of high maturity, and some of the river channel and
shallow neritic sediments may be pretty well sorted. When intense blockfaulting occurs in the continental interior (e.g., Basin and Range province),
very rapid erosion and presence of abrupt scarps leads to the production of
immense thicknesses of continental sediments, huge alluvial fans,
mudflows, bahadas, bolson fill, and fluvial sediments. As a whole then, these
deposits will be of low maturity, but occasional river channel sands or lake
beaches (e.g., Lake Bonneville) may be quite well sorted. In a tectonically
stable shield area, the shoreline transgresses and regresses over large areas
because of the flat topography, while subsidence is very slow and little
sediment influx occurs. Thus most of the sediments are beach (or dune)
deposits, and fluvial sands have only a temporary existence because they
are destroyed and reworked by the next marine transgression. The beach
sands are packed one against the other by shoreline shifts, to produce a
wide sheet of highly matured sand. But neritic sediments (and 107
occasionally-preserved fluvial sediments) may be just as clayey and poorly
sorted as the fluvial or neritic sediments produced in the other more active
tectonic frameworks. Thus grandiose tectonic conclusions should not be
drawn from one or a few samples, unless it can be shown that they are
typical of a large stratigraphic interval. A single bed of very well-sorted sand
may represent a beach, but one cannot jump immediately and conclude that
the beach sand formed in a tectonically stable framework; it may be just a
local beach in a great mass of deltaic sediments formed in a violently
subsiding geosyncline. The decision on what type of tectonism is
represented has to be made by examining the quantitative distribution of
environments over a large stratigraphic interval, and integrating this with
other rock features such as mineralogy, thickness distributions, and gross
stratigraphy. Thus, the textural maturity of sandstones is dependent on
environment, but volumetric importance of specific environments is
determined by tectonic activity. The mineral composition of sandstones is
controlled by source area lithology, and this in turn is also affected by
tectonism (Krynine). Consequently both properties interact, although they
show a considerable degree of independent variation. Their interaction
produces what may be called a main sequence of sandstone types: most
immature rocks, usually formed during periods of crustal unrest, are rich in
unstable constituents like metamorphic rock fragments, micas, and
feldspars, hence are usually arkoses or litharenites. Most supermature rocks,
formed during periods of crustal stability, have suffered enough abrasion or

weathering to remove the unstable constituents, and the only thing that
remains is quartz; thus they are usually quartzarenites. Sublitharenites and
subarkoses frequently represent transitional stages of maturity and
mineralogy. There are many exceptions to the main sequence, however,
which are very important to recognize as they represent unusual conditions
of climate or depositional environment. ivlature litharenite, supermature
sublitharenites, immature and submature orthoquartzites, and mature and
supermature arkoses are quite common examples falling off the main
sequence. Any mineral composition can occur in any stage of textural
maturity, but certain conditions are preferred in nature. Krynines Theory of
the Tectonic Control of Sandstone Properties M. S. Shvetsov, in the 1920s,
was apparently the first one to realize that pure quartz sandstones are
characteristic of stable shelf areas and quiescent continental shields, or
kratons; and that sandstones in erogenic areas are much more complex
mineralogically--either arkoses (rich in feldspar), graywackes (rich in rock
fragments) or tuff ites (rich in volcanics). But Krynine went further and about
1940 set up his system, a three-stage scheme for linking the tectonic
development of a continent with deposition of specific mineralogical
sandstone types. These were, in chronological order; (I) Quiescence or
Peneplanation Stage, resulting in quartzite; (II) Moderate Deformation or
Geosynclinal Stage, resulting in graywacke--i.e., a sandstone rich in
metamorphic rock fragments, micas and micaceous clay matrix; and (III)
Violent Deformation or Post-geosynclinal Phase, resulting in arkose. For
references in which these ideas were presented, see PDK memorial in I966
JSP. The most accessible references are JG I948 and AGU Trans. 1951. The
following is an ultra-brief condensation of Krynines ideas. A typical segment
of the earths crust is assumed to consist of three layers: sediments on top,
metamorphics and veins next, and plutonic igneous rocks at greatest depth.
Krynines idea is that increasing amounts of tectonic activity are required to
bring these successively deeper layers to the surface so that they can act as
source areas.