My collaborators and I have a new paper out in the journal GSA Bulletin about sediment transfer across deep-marine slopes as recorded in the stratigraphy of submarine channel deposits. (It’s worth mentioning that this paper is also open access!)

Deep-sea channels, as we can map them on the modern Earth surface, extend for 1000s of km into ocean basins and rival the planet’s biggest rivers as conveyors of sediment and other material. Much progress has been made in recent years in tools and technology for mapping and studying the ocean floor. Additionally, numerical modeling of the physics of sediment transport in the submarine realm is advancing our understanding of turbidity currents. However, ancient sedimentary deposits that are now exposed in outcrop provide the opportunity to examine the relationships of individual turbidity current event beds to the larger-scale stratigraphy that they construct. Examining the stratigraphic architecture allows for reconstruction of longer-term evolution of the depositional system.

With examples from exceptionally exposed strata from the Magallanes Basin in southern Chile, we emphasize the importance of the fine-grained and thin-bedded deposits that are preserved at the margins of sedimentary bodies we interpret as channels. Although the thick-bedded and coarse-grained deposits make up most of the volume of the composite features, it’s the margin deposits that contain the history of sediment transfer through the channel.