Continental-Slope Sedimentation: The View from Northern California

T H E SLOPE PORTION of the STRATAFORM program sets out to establish a better understanding of the sedimentary processes important in developing the stratigraphic record of continental slopes over the past 10' years. To understand how sediment sequences and their bounding surfaces form on slopes, the project seeks to investigate processes that influence sediment erosion, transport, and accumulation. Project objectives include identification of the sources, fluxes, and mechanisms of sediment transported to and deposited on the slope: determination of the fluxes and mechanisms of sediment remobilized, eroded, and transported within and out of the slope; examinat ion of how the processes identified above interact to form slope strata, unconformities, sequences, and morphology. In this paper we report on the approach to meeting these tasks, some preliminary field results, and future plans.