The sedimentary record provides the most complete archive of Earth history, from deep time to the present, providing records of early Earth, through orogenic cycles and basin histories, to markers of environmental change and mass extinctions. Sequence stratigraphy, petrology and petrography, as well as isotope geochemistry, including radioisotopic dating, are all being used to disentangle the complex history of Earth. Interpreting the geological record is not straightforward because signals from source rocks can become progressively blurred during translation from source to sink. In addition, the preservation of source rocks themselves is biased towards certain geological environments. Geological bias includes, for example, the mineral fertility and geochemistry of source rocks, regional exhumation and erosion histories, the various processes that act to bias the sedimentary record during sediment transport and weathering, or even procedures of sampling, laboratory treatment and analysis. Furthermore, with the advent of Big Data, uncertainty, accuracy, representation and context of data becomes an increasingly important facet. To extract meaningful information from our datasets we need to quantify the influence of these biases, learn how to best avoid or correct for them, and determine the most appropriate routes for data presentation.
To strengthen our understanding of this diverse topic, we invite contributions across all scales from a breadth of fields that include data modelling and handling, provenance reconstruction, mineral fertility, and geochemical and isotopic rock, sediment and single-grain analyses.

Keynote speaker: Dr Pieter Vermeesch