Frontiers and future prospects of international sedimentological research: Review on the 37th International Meeting of Sedimentology

The 37thInternational Meeting of Sedimentology (also referred to as the 37th IMS) was held in June 2024 in Aberdeen, UK, focusing on the frontiers of sedimentology. Specifically, this meeting highlighted cutting-edge academic issues including the interactions between the Earth, life, and climate, Precambrian environments, source-to-sink systems, fluvial and lacustrine sedimentation, tidal action and neritic sedimentation, deep-water sedimentation, and the diagenesis and reservoir characterization of siliceous clastic rocks. Additional focal areas included carbonate rocks and evaporites, ichnology, volcanoes and geochemistry, planetary sedimentology, geothermal resources and energy transition, seismic sedimentology, and AI-based new methodologies and technologies for sedimentological research. This meeting emphasized the importance of paleoclimate research in deciphering deep-time global changes, presenting a novel approach to reconstruct paleoclimate using high-resolution sedimentary records. It underscored the coupling relationships among tectonic activities, climate change, and sedimentary processes, positing that elucidating source-to-sink transport mechanisms necessitates multi-scale geomorphological reconstruction and sediment flux simulations. Furthermore, this meeting underlined the transport and deposition mechanisms of fine-grained sediments in deep-water environments, and introduced novel machine learning-based methods for automatic sedimentary facies identification, reservoir prediction, and sedimentary process simulation. A comprehensive analysis of the cutting edge obtained from the 37th IMS reveals that future sedimentological research in China should prioritize research on paleoclimate and deep-time global changes, paleogeomorphology and source-to-sink systems, deep-water sedimentation and fine-grained sedimentology, and new technologies such as big data and AI. The purpose is to achieve the national energy strategic objectives and establish a sedimentological theoretical system that reflects the regional geological characteristics of China.