GY4027
Topic 3: Transport and Deposition
Material isn’t transported for ever, eventually it’s deposited.
By the end of this topic you should be able to:
- Explain which transport agents deposit sediments locally, or more widespread
- Explain the influence of sediment particle size on where sediments are deposited
- Explain the influence of sediment particle size on where sediments are deposited
- Describe the concept of accommodation space for sediment deposition
Lecture
Lecture slides: L3 Transport and Deposition
Reading
Suggested Textbook
I suggest reading Chapter Five of Huggett, R. (2017) Fundamentals of Geomorphology, 4th Edition. Routledge, London.
Chapter Five is the chapter on plate tectonics. Tectonics is one of the main driving forces for landscapes, so it’s essential to understanding landscape evolution. It’s particularly relevant for basin dynamics, which we discuss this topic, and in the creation of upland landscapes, which we’ll discuss next topic.
Available online.
Academic papers
- Scheck-Wenderoth, M. 2020. Sedimentary Basins. In: Gupta, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-10475-7_216-1
This is an article from the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics, a reference work - so it’s (a) a nice general introduction which then (b) gets insanely more complicated than you need towards the end. But the first part is really useful to understand sedimentary basins.
- Dethier, E.N., Renshaw, C.E., and Magilligan, F.J. 2022. Rapid changes to global river suspended sediment flux by humans. Science 376, 1447-1452. doi: 10.1126/science.abn7980
I didn’t talk about it in the lecture, but humans are changing geomorphology. We’ll cover this more in Topic 11, but it’s worth considering the human impact on some of what we discussed this topic - in this case, sediment transport from rivers into global oceans.
Optional additional reading
Another paper about how humans are changing processes is
- Hilderman, R., MacDonald, J., Griffin, S., Slaymark, C., Einsle, J., & Monaghan, A. 2024 Heterogeneous lithification across a legacy coastal slag bank: the creation of new sedimentary rock from anthropogenic material. Sedimentologika 2, 1318. doi: 10.57035/journals/sdk.2024.e21.1318
Like other “optional” suggested papers, you definitely don’t need to try and understand everything in here, but an overview certainly might make you think differently about the topic.