 Welcome to sedimentology and stratigraphy, the social distancing version. I'm Dawn Sumner and I taught this class more than a dozen times. That's one of my favorite to teach because sedimentology and stratigraphy is so useful. I use it for my own work. I am very interested in the early evolution of life on Earth and that is recorded in the sedimentary record. In particular, I'm interested in how the oxygen production process in photosynthesis evolved in bacteria and how those chemical signatures and the interaction of bacteria and their environment are recorded in the rock record. I also help run the Curiosity Rover on Mars, which is investigating a sedimentary sequence in Gale Crater that records the early history of Mars. So we're learning a huge amount about sedimentology on another planet through that mission. I'll be pulling in some of those aspects of sedimentology and stratigraphy into the class this quarter. So my goal for you as students in this class is to learn sedimentology and stratigraphy techniques and understand how those can be used in a variety of other earth sciences and how there are tools for understanding things like earth history, environmental geology, how to find and use resources. For example, water and aquifers or hydrocarbon resources or even some metal and mineral deposits are found in sedimentary rocks. So for example, a lot of the gold extracted from the Sierra Nevada during Gold Rush days was detrital gold in river deposits and we'll talk about why the gold gets concentrated in certain places in those deposits. So I am hoping that you will enjoy this class, even though we don't get to see each other face-to-face in person at this point. But the tools are really useful and these videos will be available online for a long time. So this is the first introductory video and I'll set up a whole suite of them that cover the key aspects of sedimentology and stratigraphy for you to use to help you learn. So thanks for watching.