Bedding surfaces: true substrates and Earth's historical archive – an introduction

Bedding surfaces are innate components of the fabric of sedimentary successions and define the beds that they bound. However, despite their ubiquity across many sedimentary strata and their use and description in a huge variety of geological studies, the importance and diversity of these stratal phenomena can frequently be overlooked and ill-defined. In this introductory text, a brief review of the history of understanding of bedding surfaces is presented: from the seventeenth-century origins of the lithological use of the word ‘bed’ to recent advances such as the isolation and use of true substrates, as bedding surfaces that archive the ancient interface between substrate and air/water. The open questions and contradictions that persist in our understanding of bedding planes, and their utility in interpreting Earth history, are summarized and provide the springboard for introducing the diverse papers in this volume. Together, the papers collected here shed new light on these familiar phenomena from several angles, including sedimentological and stratigraphic discussions of the divergent origins and meanings of different types of siliciclastic and carbonate bedding surfaces, details of practical considerations when using bedding surface signatures in palaeontological and ichnological studies, and a series of case studies illustrating how bedding surfaces (and particularly true substrates) can inform palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.