…sit at Earth’s passive continental margins. How can we use forward models of landscape and seascape evolution to read that stratigraphic record and infer something about past landscapes? In this new paper we use beautiful stratigraphic data from the southern Atlantic Ocean to find the optimal form of models for the development of passive margin stratigraphy over geologic time. Spoiler alert: margin evolution is dominated by nonlocal sediment transport events like marine landslides, turbidity currents, and marine debris flows.
Research Geomorphologist at the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station