Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Environmental sedimentology:
introduction
Chris Perry and Kevin Taylor
1.1
ENVIRONMENTAL SEDIMENTOLOGY
:
DEFINITION AND
SCOPE OF CHAPTERS
interlinked issues of sediment production, trans-
port and accumulation.
This topic is divided into nine main chapters,
each of which deals with a distinct sedimentary
system. These are delineated as follows; moun-
tains, fluvial, arid, lacustrine, urban, temperate
intertidal (estuarine and deltaic), temperate
coastal (beach, barrier island and dune), trop-
ical coastal (coral reef and mangrove) and con-
tinental shelf. Although this structure provides
a convenient approach for distinguishing and
describing individual sedimentary environments,
such subdivisions are to some extent arbitrary
and, in light of the sediment exchanges that occur
between environments, not necessarily ideal. As
a result, the linkages that exist between envir-
onments are highlighted where appropriate. In
addition, the topic does not set out to review
every type of sedimentary environment, but rather
to provide a framework for the subject in the
context of a number of key sedimentary systems
and settings. Given these caveats, each of the
chapters examines aspects of sediment supply
and accumulation, the response of the individual
sedimentary systems to natural and anthropogenic
change, and issues of sediment management and
remediation, and reviews the potential responses
of these sedimentary systems to issues such as
climatic and environmental change.
The chapters in this topic essentially deal
with sedimentological processes and geomor-
phological changes that have been operating
over short-to-medium (
Environmental sedimentology represents a rela-
tively new subdiscipline of the earth sciences
and, as such, the boundaries of the field are
not clearly defined. Herein we define environ-
mental sedimentology as ...'
the study of the
effects of both man and environmental change
upon active surface sedimentary systems
'. Con-
sequently, environmental sedimentology can be
regarded as the study of how both natural and
anthropogenic inputs and events modify the
production and accumulation of the physical
and biogenic constituents of recent sedimentary
deposits. The field of environmental sedimento-
logy has evolved gradually over the past two
decades, largely owing to an increased recogni-
tion of the influence that anthropogenic activ-
ities are exerting upon sediment production
and cycling. Studies in these areas reflect a need
to address issues of sedimentological change
driven by environmental or land-use modifica-
tion or contamination. This, in turn, has pro-
moted increasingly integrated approaches to
examining the dynamics of, and interlinkages
between, sedimentary environments, the nature
of which can be illustrated by one example,
namely studies that link catchment processes
(and anthropogenically induced changes in catch-
ment sediment yields) with sediment supply to
(and through) the coastal zone. Here, disciplines
such as slope geomorphology, fluvial sedimento-
logy, hydrology, coastal and marine sedimento-
logy, and coastal management combine to assess
100 yr) time-scales
(
biological
time-scales of Spencer 1995;
secular
time-scales of Udvardy 1981), although many of
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