Standards for digital micrograph of the sedimentary rocks
Xiumian Hu, Wen Lai, Yiwei Xu, Shijie Zhang, Xiaolong Dong
Abstract
<p indent="0mm">Rock is a major material for the crust and upper mantle formation of the Earth. In Earth Sciences, polarizing microscope plays an important role in the study of petrography and microscopic images. However, there has been a lack of unified standards for rock photomicrograph acquisition in geology for a long time, and hence no comprehensive databases of microscopic rock images under unified specifications. Hereby we launched this special issue as a springboard to systematically integrate the photomicrograph data of sedimentary rocks while facilitating a unified standard for data collection, entry and storage in the field. In this article, we explore standards for dataset development based on both straightforward and derived information from repeatable observations of the thin sections of the three major sedimentary rocks, namely, limestones, sandstones, and mixed siliciclastic and carbonate rocks. The standards delineated here serve as a framework for data collection and processing in other studies of this special issue.