|
Controls on Formation and Strategies for Study |
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA
De Geer’s intuition about the effects of seasonal climate forcing on sedimentation proved to be correct. His determination to leap-frog varve correlations from one site to another allowed him to recognize the power of the solstice cycle. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my students and I performed a similar experiment by correlating much thinner, non-glacial laminae across single geological basins (Anderson & Kirkland 1966; Kirkland & Anderson 1970; Anderson et al. 1972). We relived the heady excitement of de Geer’s discovery of varve correlation by extending his discovery into other environments. Long-distance, millimetre-scale correlations in single basins eventually were extended to around 1000 km in the Black Sea (Hay et al. 1991). It was de Geer’s insight, the work of Sauramo (1923), of Richter-Bernberg (1960), and some of our own long-distance correlations that demonstrated that the annual cycle of climate forcing was strong enough to regulate the accumulation of sediment over entire basins, over broad geographic areas, and within a wide range of geological settings and environments.
Appreciation of the effects of the solstice cycle on sedimentation was reinforced by results from sediment trapping investigations carried out during the 1970s and 1980s. The design of sediment traps was improved to include time-series sampling (Anderson 1977), which revealed associations of specific sediment types with the seasons. It was found that sediment traps, even when deployed far from land and at great depths in the ocean, revealed a clear pattern of seasonal accumulation of sediment of varying composition. This information
...
This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
This article has been cited by other articles:
 |
|
 |
|
  A. J. Plater, J. Ridgway, B. Rayner, I. Shennan, B. P. Horton, E. Y. Haworth, M. R. Wright, M. M. Rutherford, and A. G. Wintle Sediment provenance and flux in the Tees Estuary: the record from the Late Devensian to the present Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 2000; 166: 171 - 195. [Abstract] [PDF]
|
|
