and provide a powerful tool in predict-ing future climate change. Perhaps thegreatest advance in stratigraphy andsedimentary geology over the last 40years has been with the developmentof Sequence Stratigraphy. Pioneeredin the mid 1970s by Peter Vail and hisco-workers at the US oil giant ExxonMobil, it explains the complex geom-etries that sediments acquire as theyaccumulate in response to changes in