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British Geological Survey, Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG, UK
The last two decades have seen a major resurgence of interest, both commercial and scientific, in the early Paleogene stratigraphy of northwest Europe. The commercial interest has arisen primarily as a result of major oil and gas finds in the central and Northern North Sea, mostly in deep-water sandstones of late Paleocene to mid Eocene age. Increased interest in the onshore sections has been stimulated partly in response to the offshore hydrocarbon exploration, but largely through the activities of international (IUGS/IGCP) working groups, whose primary concern is the establishment of a globally standardized system of series and stages. The onshore sections of the southern North Sea Basin area are of particular importance in these investigations, because they include the historical stratotypes for the Paleocene and Eocene series and for their constituent stages. Unfortunately, these historical stratotypes are inappropriate as global stratotypes because of their stratigraphic incompleteness, and their limited representation of the standard Paleogene biozones. Only through the fullest understanding of these historical stratotype sections, however, can we ensure that the standard stages are defined in a way that ensures the maximum compatibility with traditional assignments in NW Europe (Knox 1994; Schmitz 1994).
For a long time the commercially driven and scientifically driven lines of investigation proceeded more or less independently, partly because of the confidential nature of the offshore investigations and partly because of difficulties in correlating widely separated sections of strongly contrasting lithofacies and biofacies. For these reasons, the earlier stratigraphic compliations for the Paleogene of northwest. Europe
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