ABSTRACT

The dimensional orientation of sand grains is a directional property of sediments that has great potential for application to geologic problems such as direction of sediment transport, environment of deposition, and trend of sand bodies. Slow and tedious microscope methods, however, limit the accumulation of adequate orientation data. We need a rapid, economical method to obtain basic data in a wide variety of well known modern depositional and ancient geologic situations so we can evaluate the usefulness of grain orientation measurements.

A photometer method was tested and concluded to be of limited applicability. The photometric method depends upon a consistent simple relation between sand grain dimensional axes and crystallographic axes, but several investigators have shown this relationship to be complex.

An electronic flying spot scanner was tested with promising results. It provides the grain orientation pattern of a sandstone sample in a few minutes time, and the results compare favorably with those obtained by more laborious microscope methods.