Kerogen image gallery indexVirtually all oil and gas comes from the heating of buried sedimentary organic matter (or kerogen). This material is mostly derived from microscopic dispersed particles derived from terrestrial and aquatic plants and their degradation products; it sometimes preserves a specific morphology that allows its source to be identified, and this in turn allows a better understanding of the depositional environment of the sediments in which it is found (e.g. marine or freshwater, onshore or offshore, oxidising or reducing, etc.). The gallery provides palynological and fluorescence images of the types of organic particles and debris that form most of the organic matter in sediments, but also includes a few examples of some specific (atypical) kinds of organic microfossils of interest to geochemists. These photographs and captions are mostly taken from Tyson, R.V. 1995, Sedimentary Organic Matter: Organic Facies and Palynofacies. Originally published by Chapman & Hall (December 1994), who were taken over by Kluwer Academic. The photographs are copyright protected. These images concentrate mainly on non-palynomorph particulate organic matter, plus some oil-prone "algal" palynomorphs. I apologise that there are no scales given, but most of the particles displayed range from 20 to 400 micrometres in diameter. |
