LARGE SCALE EXPORT OF SHALLOW WATER CARBONATE TO DEEP WATER SETTINGS: CONRAD NEUMANN AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SATELLITE SEDIMENTOLOGY

I met Conrad Neumann in 1974. He had a pile of rocks and I agreed to work on them for my master's thesis. I was with ACN for the next 8 years, eventually claiming my position as his Senior Grad Student. I was his colleague for many more.

Conrad had tons of strange samples. I had never seen such rocks. But then neither had anyone else. From the deep flanks of Little Bahama Bank came new mechanisms of lithification such that well-washed sands became muddy nodules, mounds and slabs.

I was allowed to wrestle with the petrography; to consolidate findings and present conclusions. A “paste-to-peloid-to-spar” cementing sequence proved to be the key to lithification in lithotherms and hardgrounds. Under Conrad I made my first scientific discoveries.

In 1975 Conrad won, with co-author Lynton Land, the Best Paper from JSP. The Introduction presented an overview of the comings and goings of the “needle” aragonite which was illustrated by a Conrad Cartoon. Big questions were presented: If the mud was not accumulating on the banks then where was it? How was it getting there? What exactly were the Energetics of Export? A generation of Product Sedimentologists went looking for the “missing mud”. I was among them and in 1990 I described and mapped thick sequences of aragonite mud encompassing much of the Quaternary along the 400-km western slope of Great Bahama Bank. This demonstrated rapid lateral growth of large carbonate platforms. The implication for Process Sedimentology was that mud was leaving the banks in large volumes, at frequent intervals.

But catching export events was next to impossible. Conrad, always taking pictures especially from airplanes, expressed the desire to be able to watch the Banks everywhere, all the time. In 2018, NASA opened the data portal for its Earth Observing Satellites - Terra and Aqua - and Conrad’s wish became a reality. Process observations of carbonate export events was possible on a global scale. Many of Conrad’s insights, embedded in Figure 1, are proving to be correct. In that it is the only illustration that us Satellite Sedimentologists must reference, it can be fairly said that Conrad was a progenitor of our craft.