Bücher der Reihe Sedimentology and Petroleum Geology

The optical studies of fossil organic matter in reflected light have made great progress in recent decades with the development of coal petrology, completed around the end of the 1970s by fluorescence examination.

The monograph presented to foreign readers has been prepared by the famous Soviet investigators of processes of geochemistry and sedimentation in the Mediterranean Sea. A great number of scientific papers and some books devoted to the processes of sedimentation and geochemistry of the Mediterranean Sea were written by them.

After the Secpnd World War, a comprehensive investigation of the World Ocean started, and new data were obtained on a wide distribution of manganese nodules and their polymetallic composition, that made scientists consider nodules as one of the major characteristics of the deep oceanic zone.