The Silurian geology of Gotland, Sweden

Gotland is an island in the central Baltic, long recognized as the most outstanding outcrop of Silurian shallow-water marine sediments in the world. These represent deposition in tropical environments in an epeiric sea on the small continent of Baltica. The sediments are interbedded limestones and shales with subordinate sandstones and are developed as a carbonate platform on the underlying Precambrian, Cambrian and Ordovician. Particularly spectacular are reef deposits, rich in stromatoporoid sponges, which occur throughout the Gotland sequence. The sequence is almost undisturbed and provides an excellent field laboratoy to study a variety of Silurian facies.