Sedimentology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A pan-Arctic estimate of past and future subsea permafrost including solid Earth effects causes local sea level to differ from the global mean. Future subsea permafrost disappears faster under high than low emissions scenarios.

    • Roger C. Creel
    • , Frederieke Miesner
    •  & Pier Paul Overduin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    14% of the world’s coastlines are muddy and the majority of them are eroding at rates exceeding 1 m per year over the last three decades, according to an automated classification method that identifies global coastlines.

    • Romy Hulskamp
    • , Arjen Luijendijk
    •  & Stefan Aarninkhof

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dunes and woody-debris preserved in the rock record have been used to quantify the magnitude and duration of flow events in ancient rivers, revealing a fluvial system dominated by flashy, storm-driven floods 300 million years ago.

    • Jonah S. McLeod
    • , James Wood
    •  & Alexander C. Whittaker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in climate preconditioned large-scale, recurrent Miocene to Pleistocene Antarctic submarine landslides through variations in biological productivity, ice proximity and ocean circulation, posing tsunami risk to Southern Hemisphere populations.

    • Jenny A. Gales
    • , Robert M. McKay
    •  & Zhifang Xiong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors use seismic and sedimentology data to estimate the volume of the Minoan eruption. The results show that the Plinian phase contributed most to the distal tephra fall, and that the pyroclastic flow volume is significantly smaller than previously assumed.

    • Jens Karstens
    • , Jonas Preine
    •  & Christian Berndt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study shows that the total energy loss of gravity currents has a non-linear dependence on the work required to keep sediment in suspension, highlighting the importance of large-scale mixing for the particulate transport of gravity currents.

    • Sojiro Fukuda
    • , Marijke G. W. de Vet
    •  & Robert M. Dorrell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fisher et al. combine sediment geochemistry and climate modelling to reveal long-term synchrony between erosion rates and orbitally-driven climate oscillations in the tectonically-active southern Central Andes.

    • G. Burch Fisher
    • , Lisa V. Luna
    •  & Lucas J. Lourens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The archetypal supergreenhouse Cretaceous Earth had an active cryosphere with permafrost in plateau deserts. A modern analogue is the aeolian–permafrost system from the Qiongkuai Lebashi Lake area, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China.

    • Juan Pedro Rodríguez-López
    • , Chihua Wu
    •  & Chao Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Submarine fans play an important role in routing sediment in continental and deep water settings. Here the authors develop a framework is to explain the shape of submarine fans using a numerical model framework which can either predict seafloor topography from turbidity current flow properties or infer these flow properties from seafloor topography.

    • Abdul Wahab
    • , David C. Hoyal
    •  & Kyle M. Straub

  • Article
    | Open Access

    South American cordilleran orogenic systems have repeated complex magmatic and deformation histories. Here the authors analyze detrital zircons found in the Amazon deep-sea fan that record mountain-building events and reveal cycles of orogenesis with periods of ~60–90 Myr since the Phanerozoic.

    • Cody C. Mason
    • , Brian W. Romans
    •  & Andrea Fildani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A climate sensitive permafrost region (Yedoma domain) was found to contain globally relevant N stock of >40 Gt nitrogen, of which 4 to 16 Gt of the N could become available by thaw until 2100. This study increases the current estimates by nearly 50%.

    • Jens Strauss
    • , Christina Biasi
    •  & Guido Grosse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modeling cosmogenic nuclides concentrations from Kalahari Desert Sand reveals the time of sand introduction into the landscape. This coincides with morphotectonic and climatic changes that could have triggered sand production and its impact on the environment.

    • Shlomy Vainer
    • , Ari Matmon
    •  & Karim Keddadouche

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Astrochronology of a core in Maryland suggests that the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) warming lasted about 6 thousand years. These data are more consistent with astronomical forcing than an extraterrestial trigger for the PETM.

    • Mingsong Li
    • , Timothy J. Bralower
    •  & Marci M. Robinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study found that millennial periods of higher rainfall combined with rising sea level enhanced sediment accumulation in Amazonian rivers valleys. This fuelled synchronous expansion of vegetation adapted to seasonally flooded substrates and its specialized bird populations, showing how global climate changes can affect specific Amazonian species.

    • A. O. Sawakuchi
    • , E. D. Schultz
    •  & C. C. Ribas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Powerful avalanches were recorded for the first time in an underwater canyon that lies 100 s of km from land. This challenges a long-held view and indicates > 1000 similar canyons worldwide actively pump sediment and pollutants into the deep-sea.

    • M. S. Heijnen
    • , F. Mienis
    •  & M. A. Clare

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Banded iron formations, precipitates of Precambrian seawater, record global 182W isotope signatures derived from continental weathering and hydrothermal mantle fluxes into ancient oceans, tracking Earth’s geodynamic evolution through deep time.

    • A. Mundl-Petermeier
    • , S. Viehmann
    •  & C. Münker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Chengjiang Biota is the earliest most diverse animal community from the Cambrian Explosion (~518 million years ago). This biota is shown to have colonized a delta, highlighting the importance of this shallow environment in recording early snapshots of life on Earth.

    • Farid Saleh
    • , Changshi Qi
    •  & Xiaoya Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sand spikes, sandstone bodies that have been enigmatic for nearly two centuries, represent a new type of seismite and a promising tool to identify strong impact-induced or tectonic paleo-earthquakes and their source regions in the geologic record.

    • Elmar Buchner
    • , Volker J. Sach
    •  & Martin Schmieder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of Southern Ocean gateways contributing to the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition is still debated. Here, the authors present high-resolution ocean simulations to show that gateways opening led to a reorganization of ocean circulation, heat transport and Antarctic surface water cooling.

    • Isabel Sauermilch
    • , Joanne M. Whittaker
    •  & Joseph H. LaCasce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Harmful algal and bacterial blooms are increasingly frequent in lakes and rivers. From the Sydney Basin, Australia, this study uses fossil, sedimentary and geochemical data to reveal bloom events following forest ecosystem collapse during the end-Permian event and that blooms have consistently followed warming-related extinction events, inhibiting the recovery of freshwater ecosystems for millennia.

    • Chris Mays
    • , Stephen McLoughlin
    •  & Vivi Vajda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reconciling the Snowball Earth hypothesis with sedimentological cyclicity has been a persistent challenge. A new cyclostratigraphic climate record for a Cryogenian banded iron formation in Australia provides evidence for orbital forcing of ice sheet advance and retreat cycles during Snowball Earth.

    • Ross N. Mitchell
    • , Thomas M. Gernon
    •  & Xiaofang He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is a lot of uncertainty about what Earth’s climate and geography were like in the early Cambrian, when animal life diversified throughout the oceans. Here we show that numeric comparisons of model simulations and climatically influenced rocks can help constrain geography and climate during this time.

    • Thomas W. Wong Hearing
    • , Alexandre Pohl
    •  & Thijs R. A. Vandenbroucke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Present et al. examine the processes controlling lithification of microbial mats in a Caribbean peritidal carbonate environment. The authors present sedimentological and geochemical evidence of a surprising bias against preserving the most robust, widespread microbial ecosystems in the sedimentary record.

    • Theodore M. Present
    • , Maya L. Gomes
    •  & John P. Grotzinger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigates the underlying physical mechanisms of turbidity currents travelling thousands of miles in confined submarine settings, rather than diffusing after short distance. Using high resolution simulations with up to a billion grid points helps to understand the evolving layered structure of a current.

    • Jorge S. Salinas
    • , S. Balachandar
    •  & M. I. Cantero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors here present a multi-lake paleoseismological approach to evaluate the role of earthquakes in causing a spatio-temporal cluster of large, prehistoric rockslides between 3000 and 4200 years ago in the Eastern European Alps and for which the triggering mechanisms are still debated.

    • Patrick Oswald
    • , Michael Strasser
    •  & Jasper Moernaut

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human activities have accelerated soil erosion and landscape change in many areas. Here the authors show how rates of erosion, sediment transfer and alluvial sedimentation have increased by an order of magnitude across North America since European colonization, far exceeding the rates expected of natural processes.

    • David B. Kemp
    • , Peter M. Sadler
    •  & Veerle Vanacker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phosphorus is an essential nutrient critical for agriculture, but because it is non-renewable its future availability is threatened. Here the authors show that across the globe most nations have net losses of phosphorus, with soil erosion as the major route of loss in Europe, Africa and South America.

    • Christine Alewell
    • , Bruno Ringeval
    •  & Pasquale Borrelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The proliferation of dams since 1950 has promoted sediment deposition in reservoirs, which is thought to be starving the coast of sediment and decreasing resistance to storms and sea-level rise. Here, the authors show that century-long records of sediment mass accumulation rates and sediment accumulation rates more than doubled after 1950 in coastal depocenters around North America.

    • A. B. Rodriguez
    • , B. A. McKee
    •  & A. N. Atencio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this study, Smith and colleagues employ analogue experiments to show the controlling parameters on sediment bedforms in pyroclastic density current deposits. The findings are applied and validated on natural deposits.

    • Gregory Smith
    • , Peter Rowley
    •  & Samuel Capon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Identification of stratospheric volcanic eruptions in the geological record and their link to mass extinction events during the past 540 million years remains challenging. Here, the authors report unexpected, large mass-independent sulphur isotopic compositions of pyrite in Late Ordovician sedimentary rocks, which they suggest originates from stratospheric volcanism linked to the first pulse of the Late Ordovician mass extinction.

    • Dongping Hu
    • , Menghan Li
    •  & Yanan Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tidewater glaciers in fjords can advance/retreat independent of climate due to stabilization by sediments at their termini. We show that an Alaskan paleo-ice stream behaved similarly on an open shelf, suggesting that increased sediment flux may delay catastrophic retreat of outlet glaciers in a warming world.

    • Ellen A. Cowan
    • , Sarah D. Zellers
    •  & Stewart J. Fallon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A reference function for describing the orientation of clay platelets in clay-rich materials is still lacking, but is necessary for applications such as prediction of water and solute transfer and designs of innovative materials. Here, the authors determine a reference orientation function of clay platelets, and validate their function for both engineered and natural clay-rich media.

    • Thomas Dabat
    • , Fabien Hubert
    •  & Eric Ferrage

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine chemistry during the Early Earth (over 2.7 billion years ago) is commonly inferred to have been inorganically sulfate-reducing. Here, the authors argue that organic sulfur cycling may have played a previously unrecognized, yet important, role in the formation of ancient Archean marine sulfides.

    • Mojtaba Fakhraee
    •  & Sergei Katsev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The nature of erosion featured at the outlet of submarine channels is still a topic of debate. Here the authors present, based on scaled experiments, a novel flow mechanism for turbidity currents at the end of submarine channels and for the first time describe their erosional character.

    • F. Pohl
    • , J. T. Eggenhuisen
    •  & M. J. B. Cartigny

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transition from smectite to illite requires potassium incorporation, yet the role of microbes in facilitating K+ uptake remains debated, especially during the early Earth. Here, the authors suggest that the Paleoproterozoic microbial mats extracted potassium from sea water and induced localized illitization during early low-temperature diagenesis.

    • Jérémie Aubineau
    • , Abderrazak El Albani
    •  & Kurt O. Konhauser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sediments have the potential to preserve the signature of geologic events such as earthquakes. Here, the authors provide a paleoseismological analysis of the sediments of Lake Rara, Nepal, to reconstruct the number of earthquakes that caused lake shaking and subsequent turbidite deposition during the last centuries.

    • Z. Ghazoui
    • , S. Bertrand
    •  & P. A. van der Beek

Browse broader subjects

Browse Sedimentology across other nature.com journals