Sedimentology in the earth sciences

. . . the soil which has kept breaking away from the high lands during these ages and these disasters, forms no pile of sediment worth mentioning, as in other regions, but keeps sliding away ceaselessly and disappearing in the deep.

1.1 Introduction: sedimentology and earth cycling

Sedientology, the study of transport and deposition of sediment, provides information for geologists to interpret sedimentary rocks. Sediment is derived from breakdown of rocks and minerals at and near the Earth's surface. Protons and electrons from the atmosphere and hydrosphere, along with the physical action of salt and ice crystallization, act together as weathering agents to reduce the relief produced by plate tectonics. But classical physics tells us that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. To the sedimentologist, this principle means that global balances must occur between atmosphere, continent, ocean and solid earth. This aspect, recognized long ago in its essential aspects by James Hutton, is the very stuff of sedimentoiogy, cutting across stilted traditional disciplines of geology, physics and chemistry. Thus all elements involved in earth processes undergo 9 recycling and must be accounted for in sediment budgets. Recycling processes have gone on for >3.3 x 10 yr (Erikkson et al, 1994; Nijman et al., 1998), thoroughly mixing but also stratifying the Earth. More recently the activities of Homo sapiens have directly impinged on these natural processes, particularly those of direct concern to sedimentology: hence current concerns about acidification, 'greenhouse' warming, soil erosion and wholesale global pollution. These issues have many implications for sedimentologists since the Earth's atmosphere has almost certainly evolved through geological time, a point to which we shall refer on future occasions. The water cycle (Fig. 1.1) links atmosphere and climate with the rock cycle of plate tectonics. "Without surface runoff, erosion and sediment transport rates would be very much reduced and totally dependent upon simple falling and toppling due to gravity, extra-planetary impacts and so on. It is easy to make out a case for the water cycle being the most fundamental to affect the Earth's surface: it lies at the roots of just about everything. Unfortunately the cycle as a whole is not often investigated, but instead only parts are emphasized by geologists, meteorologists, oceanogra-phers and civil engineers in the light of their particular specialism. The cycle influences climate through the high heat storage and heat transfer capacities of water and water vapour, particularly when phase changes from gas to liquid to solid are involved and latent heat is transferred. It is also not generally realized that water vapour is far more important as a 'greenhouse' gas than C02 and may be expected to have a serious positive feedback effect upon planetary warming. A final aspect of the water cycle concerns the change from seawater to rainwater to ice and back 16 again. We note here that this process fractionates molecules of water which have 'light' oxygen, H2 0, compared to l8 those which have 'heavy' oxygen, H O, the latter a tiny minority. This is because more energy is required to evaporate the heavier water from the sea, and so water vapour has proportionately more light water and so, therefore, have the continental ice-sheets. Thus the waxing and waning of ice-sheets sends a tiny but measurable signal immediately (in geological terms) into the whole oceanic reservoir because of the relatively short ocean mixing times involved. The signal is then recorded in the shells of oceanic calcareous plankton. The mean residence time of atmospheric water is small because of the disparity between the vast oceanic reservoir and the water content of the atmosphere in relation to annual evapotranspiration and precipitation. The whole water content is recycled 33 times per year, giving a mean residence of only a week or so. The mean residence time of the oceans as a whole is some 3000 yr, but this is not the same for all of the oceanic water masses, values for the surface layers being only days or weeks. The fast regimes of change in near-surface water have an important role in modulating the slow regimes of change in deep oceans and glacier ice. Fig. 1.1 The Earth's water cycle and major reservoirs. Mean residence intervals for particular reservoirs may be calculated by dividing the resident mass by the annual outward flux rate. The accuracy of some components of the cycle is poor, resulting in a closure error of about 2. Continents and oceans exchange water, with precipitation exceeding evaporation over land, the excess returning as runoff: it is this runoff that is responsible for the transport of sediment from land to the oceans.

Fig. 1.2 Oxygen budgets, fluxes and biogeochemical cycles. All numbers are expressed in 1012 mol of oxygen (or capacity to combine with oxygen) per year. The chief point to notice at this stage is the large reservoir of atmospheric oxygen and the small but important role played by the burial and weathering of organic matter in the sedimentary rock cycle.