Bedded deposits of barite are supplying an increasingly large part of the world's barite production, which is now nearly 4 million tons annually. A fourfold increase in the past 25 years is due chiefly to its use in drilling mud. Bedded deposits will continue to increase in commercial importance because many contain millions of tons of high-grade barite that commonly is fine grained, dark, and fetid. A review of recent studies of the geologic and chemical features of bedded deposits in Arkansas, Nevada, and California suggested that the barite is related more closely to sedimentation and diagenesis in a eugeosynclinal environment than to later (epigenetic) replacement of favorable beds (commonly presumed to be limestone) by hydrothermal solutions. Regardless of origin, ec nomically significant deposits of dark-bedded barite probably have gone unrecognized or unsought in many sequences of sedimentary rocks throughout the world.

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