Figure 4

Figure 4.

Example of a reproducible, quantitative lithofacies data set. (A) The lower Ordovician Kinblade Formation outcropping in Ardmore Oklahoma (GPS location: 34.372821, –97.145353) is a 791 m succession of carbonate strata containing 1,922 beds. (B) Following bed-by-bed field study, sampling, and geochemical measurement, we epoxy 1 cm² chips from each sample for efficient grinding, polishing, and imaging. The chip size is chosen to best encapsulate the dominant grain, fossil, and bedform sizes in the data set. The resulting ~2,000 images (examples C–E, shown here in red-green-blue space, but all are 8-channel multispectral images) now are a documentation of the lithofacies in the measured section at Ardmore and ready for image analysis, classification, segmentation, and interpretation.