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The present chapter describes in detail a teaching-learning sequence using the CLIL approach to teach contents related to sedimentary rocks, fossils, and evolution to pre-service primary education teachers. The sequence was designed and implemented during two consecutive semesters of the academic year 2021-2022. The target students belong to the bilingual strand of the courses ‘Didactics of Experimental Sciences' I and II, dealing with physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy contents (course I) and life sciences contents (course II). The courses are taught mainly in Spanish, but this particular sequence was delivered, produced, and assessed in English. Students' performance was assessed by means of self-evaluation, peer-evaluation, as well as immediate or delayed feedback from the lecturer.

This Special Publication contains contributions for two meetings held to explore the links between geoscience and engineering in rivers and reservoirs (surface and subsurface). The first meeting was held in Brazil and, as a result, the volume contains many contributions from Brazil. The second was held in Edinburgh, and produced contributions from modern rivers in the USA, China, India and Scotland. The geological record from Carboniferous to Recent is represented. A range of outcrop techniques are presented along with statistical techniques used to identify patterns in the time series and spatial sense. The book is intended to cover the cross-disciplinary interest in rivers and their sediments, and will interest geologists, geomorphologists, civil, geotechnical and petroleum engineers, and government agencies. Some of the papers collected here demonstrate longer term impacts of human activity on rivers and how these might change the future geological record and, more importantly in the short term, impact on the UN Global Sustainability Goals.

Elizabeth Gierlowski-Kordesch (1956–2016) was a leader and innovator in the specialty field of limnogeology since its beginnings in the late 1980s. Her excitement for field work and examining sediments was contagious, and she was always testing new research ideas. Beth would have been thrilled with the diversity of papers presented in the volume and the wide array of techniques used to determine the history, geochemistry, paleontology, and paleoclimate preserved in the sediments in basins that are located on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. She would also have been delighted that half the chapters were first authored by highly cited women scientists. Beth spent her career teaching, mentoring, conducting research with students and colleagues, and planning limnogeology conferences, books, and field trips. Her contributions span deep-time lakes from North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, starting with her work on the Lower Jurassic East Berlin Formation where she conducted her Ph.D. research. Her work with Kerry Kelts at the University of Minnesota produced two books summarizing global lake research. These volumes are still used by many researchers, particularly as a starting point in their limnogeological studies. Her collaboration with Springer Nature® resulted in the series entitled Syntheses in Limnogeology, a publication that likely would not exist without her enthusiasm and perseverance. The papers in this second volume in the series describe a variety of Jurassic to modern lakes that range from fresh to hypersaline, shallow to deep, vary in size from

Continental carbonates are currently of high interest for the oil and gas industry, as they have proved to be good reservoir rocks in Brazil and Angola offshore oil fields. In this article, a tufa system in which continental carbonates formed mainly in the Pliocene (Rambla Becerra Tufa System, Guadix Basin, Betic Cordillera, S. Spain), is described in detail, and a model proposed for its formation and evolution through time. Several stages of tufa growth have been identified in the field, intercalated between stages of progradation of alluvial fan sediments. The tufa system connects laterally with the fluvial system developed in the axial valley of the Guadix Basin during the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, indicating that the tufa formation was coetaneous with the periods of lateral expansion of the fluvial system floodplain, that in previous works have been interpreted as more humid stages and potentially warmer. The absence of extraclasts in the tufa sediments points to the low activity of the alluvial fans during the tufa formation and therefore supports the idea that the main tufa growth happened during more humid stages, and the alluvial fans developed further during the more arid periods, which is consistent with other recent findings in the Guadix Basin. The tufa growth is represented by four main stages, the second one bearing the best example to study as a potential reservoir analog, as the main outcrop is a discrete body with a specific geometry and facies distribution. This main outcrop is a mound-shaped tufa build-up formed by prograding sigmoids of clastic tufa, interpreted as the ramp-like buttresses developed after a barrage in a barrage tufa system. From a preliminary isotopic study of the carbonates forming the barrage tufa system and by comparison with other tufas and travertines, the oxygen and carbon stable isotopes point to an intermediate situation between a palustrine tufa and a travertine. This information, when added to the sedimentological data, supports the idea that water feeding the tufa system probably had different sources: a meteoric one, coinciding with the surface runoff and a groundwater one, probably in the form of springs fed by groundwater from the nearby aquifers that still exist in the Mesozoic carbonates that form the External Zones of the Betic Cordillera in the area.

The central sector of the Guadix Basin (Betic Cordillera, S. Spain) hosts some of the most significant Pleistocene large-mammal sites in Europe. The basin infill is divided into six genetic units, the three lower with marine sediments and the remainder mainly continental. As the environmental characterization of the sediments is crucial to understand the ecologic and geologic processes leading to the formation of these sites, a stratigraphic, sedimentologic and petrologic study is presented. Combining a lithologic correlation with previous biostratigraphic data and new magnetostratigraphic data, a detailed litho-, bio- and magnetostratigraphic scheme has been developed for the study area. It shows the stratigraphic architecture of the central sector of the Guadix Basin, together with the age and the relative spatial position of the most important mammal sites. As well, it has been also helpful to identify several isochronous surfaces, to establish the exact position and the age of the boundary between the two last units of the continental infill in the Guadix Basin and to calculate sedimentation rates.

Sequence stratigraphy, based on climatic, tectonic, and base level parameters, can be used to understand carbonate sedimentation in continental basins. The uppermost continental fill of the Guadix Basin (Betic Cordillera), containing both siliciclastics and carbonates, is investigated here. In its central sector a thick succession of fluvio-lacustrine sediments appear, hosting several important Pliocene and Pleistocene macrovertebrate sites (Fonelas Project). The need to characterize the stratigraphic and sedimentologic context of these important paleontologic sites has lead to litho-, magneto- and biostratigraphic studies. These data, together with the sedimentologic analysis of the Pliocene and Pleistocene siliciclastic and carbonate successions, establish a sedimentary model for the fluvio-lacustrine sedimentation of the two last stages of sedimentation in the Guadix Basin (Units V and VI). Unit V comprises mostly fluvial siliciclastic sediments with less abundant carbonate beds interpreted as floodplain lakes or ponds. The latter, Unit VI, is dominated by vertically-stacked, carbonate palustrine successions. Using two pre-existent continental stratigraphic models, the influence of climate, tectonism, and stratigraphic base level during the last 3.5 Ma on the sedimentary evolution of the fluvio-lacustrine system in the Guadix Basin, especially the carbonate sedimentation patterns, is outlined.

A cyclical pattern can be observed in the central sector of the Guadix Basin (southern Spain) in the Late Pliocene-Quaternary alluvial fan deposits prograding into its axial valley. A climatic significance has been attributed to this cyclicity on the basis of sedimentological and preliminary isotopic studies. The progradation phases of the alluvial fans are here attributed to more arid time intervals in which the vegetation cover would be less developed, erosion and sediment supply would be higher, and base level would be lower. In contrast, the time intervals during which the fluvial system sediments dominated the area are inferred to be wetter and base level higher, with vegetation cover retaining the soils and preventing erosion. Permanent water supply to the river would therefore facilitate the aggradation of the floodplain and prevent progradation of the fans. Starting from a litho-, bio- and magnetostratigraphical frame provided for the area, an age is assigned to the alternation of the reddish sediments of the transverse alluvial fans and the greyish to white fluvio-lacustrine sediments of the axial drainage system. A cyclicity of ca. 100 ky has been identified in most of the alluvial fan progradation phases, falling within Milankovitch high-frequency eccentricity periodicities. Correlation of the phases with insolation curves is accordingly discussed as a possible origin for the cyclicity. Finally, the results offer new insights into early hominin occupation patterns in the region, through the identification of predictable resources of permanent fresh water that would have remained available throughout the recorded time span (that includes the Early–Middle Pleistocene transition) even during times of aridification. The study was supported by the Project CGL2009-07830/BTE and the Working Group RNM-369JA.