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This book contains a selection of the papers contributed to the 11th and Final International Field Workshop and Symposium of International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP) Project 156: Phosphorites, which was held at Hertford College, Oxford, England, 5–8 September, 1988. The main aim of the meeting, which attracted over 70 delegates and speakers representing 14 countries (Notholt & Jarvis 1989), and the aim of this volume, is to present the scientific results and ideas that have arisen from research carried out in recent years by geological surveys, universities and other establishments in many parts of the world. Phosphorites provide the basis for the world’s fertilizer industry, the backbone of modern intensive agriculture; their occurrence in a sedimentary succession is almost certainly indicative of dramatic changes in palaeoenvironment and sedimentation. Few naturally-occurring raw materials offer such a combination of great socio-economic importance and fundamental scientific significance.
During its ten-year existence, Project 156: Phosphorites became known as one of the largest and most successful of the long-term interdisciplinary geological research projects supported by the IGCP. It owes its creation in 1977 to Peter J. Cook, of the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics, Canberra, who hypothesized that a major Proterozoic — Cambrian phosphogenic province extends throughout the Asian and Australian region, one that was perhaps comparable in size (and therefore economic importance) with the Late Cretaceous — Eocene Tethyan province of northern Africa and the Middle East. Project 156 was established, therefore, as a research programme on Proterozoic—Cambrian phosphorites of Asia and
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