Geological formations and processes

Earth-surface processes research traces how sediment is produced, transported, and deposited across landscapes and ocean floors, from river deltas and continental shelves to the deep-sea basins fed by turbidity currents and submarine landslides. Understanding these pathways matters because sedimentary archives encode millions of years of climate, tectonics, and sea-level change, and because the same processes that build productive deltas or thick hydrocarbon-bearing sequences can also deliver sudden hazards to seafloor infrastructure. Researchers are actively working out how tectonic forcing and Holocene sea-level shifts interact to control where and how fast sediment accumulates, and how to read sequence-stratigraphic records well enough to reconstruct past environments with confidence. A persistent open question is how extreme, episodic events — a large submarine landslide, a flood-driven hyperpycnal flow — compare in long-term geological significance to the slow, continuous background sedimentation that dominates most depositional systems.

Works

152,378

Total citations

1,472,261

Keywords

SedimentationFluvial SystemsSequence StratigraphyTurbidity CurrentsSubmarine LandslidesDelta Evolution