If there was any doubt left that coastal sand accumulations called ‘chevrons’ are *not* related to gigantic tsunamis (see previous thoughts on the subject here and here; Ole also has a recent blog post, and see a news release here), the May issue of Geology provides additional arguments to show that this is the case. Joanne Bourgeois of University of Washington and Robert Weiss of Texas A&M University, both experts in the sedimentology of tsunami deposits, present two lines of arguments. First they show that the orientation of the Madagascar chevrons is significantly different from what is predicted through modeling the tsunami. While the tsunami wave tends to hit the coast with an overall perpendicular orientation, due to wave refraction, the ‘chevrons’ are oriented at various angles to the coast, angles that are more consistent with predominant wind directions. Second, they look at the sediment transport conditions and suggest that even coarse sand must have been in suspension in flows deep enough to create the chevrons. However, dune-like bedforms cannot develop without sediment being transported as bedload; therefore, the bedforms must have a different origin than mega-tsunamis. The obvious alternative is parabolic dunes; these well-known bedforms show up when vegetation partially covers the dune’s tails and slows down sediment transport. The authors don’t hesitate to draw the conclusion that

The extraordinary claim of “chevron” genesis by mega-tsunamis cannot withstand simple but rigorous testing.

I am far from being a tsunami expert, but I find this subject fascinating. The issue of suspended load vs. bedload and stratified or laminated vs. graded bedding is equally important for deposition from tsunami waves and turbidity currents. It is worth spending a bit of time and blogspace to explore the kind of analysis of sediment transport conditions that this paper presents.

Although I see no reasons to disagree with the paper’s conclusions (as it could be predicted from my previous posts on the subject), at first reading I didn’t fully understand the line of reasoning about suspended load vs. bedload. So here goes my attempt to understand it.

The argument goes as follows. The Rouse number is the ratio between the settling velocity of a certain grain size and the shear velocity of the flow, multiplied by von Karman’s constant (which is ~0.4): Ro = ws/k*u_shear. For a grain of a given size, if the Rouse number is larger than 2.5, the grain’s settling velocity is much larger than the upward-directed component of the turbulence, and the grain tends to stay close to the bottom, in the bedload. [This is equivalent to saying that the settling velocity has to be larger or equal to the shear velocity, a condition also known as the suspension criterion]. If the Rouse number is less than 0.8, the flow is turbulent enough to keep the grain fully suspended. In between these values, there is a zone of transitional behavior. For the flows that might have deposited the chevrons, the Rouse number is always less than 2.5, regardless of how the other parameters like the Froude number, grain diameter, and roughness length are varied. Although the authors state that the flows must have been deeper than 8 m (because most chevrons are higher than 4 m, and the flow must be at least twice as high as the bedform), there seems to be no other constraint on tsunami behavior [note that I did not have access – yet – to the supplementary web material].

So the question is: doesn’t this reasoning apply to other types of flows as well? For example, the Mississippi River is certainly deeper than 8 m in many places — does this mean that it is able to suspend very coarse (2 mm diameter) sand? In other words, what is the difference between flow in a tsunami run-up and the Mississippi River? The answers might be obvious to many, but they are certainly not obvious to me.

One thing we can do is to create a different kind of plot: instead of plotting the Rouse number against flow depth, let’s plot velocity vs. depth. I have a better feeling for what are reasonable velocities for different kind of flows than I do for Rouse numbers. The Rouse number would form the third dimension of the plot; one can visualize that as a contour map of Rouse numbers as a function of flow depth and velocity:

The Rouse numbers shown in this plot are valid for a grain diameter of 2 mm and roughness length of 1 m (using the same equations for settling velocity and shear velocity as in Bourgeois & Weiss 2009). Anything coarser than this cannot be called sand any more. So if this grain size doesn’t stay in the bedload, there is no chance for finer sediment either. It is obvious from the plot that, for flows deeper than 8-10 m, very coarse sand will be part of the bedload unless flow velocity is larger than ~5 m/s. The Mississippi River at New Orleans has velocities on the scale 1.5 m/s, so 1-2 mm sand should definitely stay close to the bottom, and in fact it does.

We know however that tsunamis are not exactly tranquil flows like the big old Mississippi at New Orleans. The larger ones are fast and furious and Google Earth might need massive updates after they rearrange entire coastal landscapes. [Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to diminish the power and destructive force of the Mississippi.] In other words, the Froude number of a tsunami run-up is larger than the Froude number of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is relatively slow and deep; the tsunami is fast and relatively shallow. The Froude number is the ratio between velocity and the square root of gravity multiplied by flow depth:

Fr = u/√(g*d)

This number for the Mississippi is much less than one (these flows are called subcritical flows). On the other hand, tsunamis are waves of very large wavelengths, and they behave even in the open ocean as shallow water waves (wavelength 20 times larger than water depth). For these kinds of waves, the velocity is solely a function of water depth:

u = √(g*d)

If we assume that the tsunami run-up has a comparable velocity to that of the tsunami wave in the nearshore zone, we find that the Froude number of the run-up must be around 1. This is obviously a very back-of-the-envelope argument, but the point is that these flows must have in general relatively large Froude numbers. If we plot the lines for Fr = 1 and Fr =1.5 on the depth-velocity diagram (see above), we can see how different likely tsunami behavior is from that of large rivers. It also becomes evident that even coarse sand would not be part of the bedload in these flows, especially not in flows deep enough to build the ‘chevrons’. Which means that sandy tsunami deposits are likely to be largely unstructured or poorly structured sand sheets rather than several m thick accumulations of cross-bedded sand.

And that ends my Saturday exercise in Fluid Mechanics 101.

Reference
Bourgeois, J., & Weiss, R. (2009). “Chevrons” are not mega-tsunami deposits–A sedimentologic assessment Geology, 37 (5), 403-406 DOI: 10.1130/G25246A.1

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Scientia Pro Publica #4

In sedimentology, the word ‘grading’ has nothing to do with exams and assignments. Instead, it refers to a regularly decreasing or increasing grain size within one sedimentary layer. Because it is much more common than the other alternative, upward decreasing grain size is called ‘normal grading’. Grains that consistently increase in size toward the top of the bed are responsible for ‘inverse grading’. Upward fining and coarsening are related terms that are often used to describe grain-size trends in not one, but multiple beds.

Normal grading in a turbidite from the Talara Basin, Peru

The simplest way to generate normal grading is to put some poorly sorted sand and water in a container, shake it up, and then let it settle. The larger grains will settle faster than the smaller ones (as Stokes’ law tells us) and most of the large grains will end up at the bottom of the deposit. [Note that some fine grains will be at the bottom as well – the ones that were already close to the bottom at the beginning of sedimentation.] This kind of static suspension settling is not how most sediment is deposited on a river bed or a beach; even if a grain is part of the suspended load, it usually goes through a phase of bedload transport, that is, a phase of jumping and rolling and bouncing on the bed, before it comes to rest. The resulting deposit usually has lots of thin layers, laminations, and there are no obvious and gradual upward changes in grain size.

What is needed is a sediment-rich flow that suddenly slows down or spreads out and looses its power to carry most of its sediment load. Grains are getting to the bottom so fast that there is not much time for the flow to keep them rolling and bouncing around; instead they quickly get buried by the other grains that are ready to take a geological break. While this is still quite different from static suspension settling (because the flow did not come to a full stop), it can be thought of as a modified version of static settling: all is needed is a horizontal velocity component, in addition to the vertical one. Of course, the segregation of the coarser grains to the bottom of the flow may have started much earlier. Typically, they never made it to the top in the first place.

Conglomerate bed in the Cretaceous Cerro Toro Formation, Torres del Paine National Park, Southern Chile. There is some inverse grading at the base of this bed, before the size of the clasts starts decreasing

Such large, sediment-laden flows are not very common, certainly not on a human timescale. When they do occur, they tend to show up in the news, especially if human artifacts, or humans themselves, become part of the normally graded deposits. Deposits of snow avalanches, volcanic ash-laden pyroclastic flows, subaerial debris flows, tsunamis, submarine turbidity currents can all show normal grading. The images shown here all come from deposits of large submarine gravity flows. Some of them (like the one below) have a muddy matrix, but the grading is still obvious (the two large clasts at the top of the bed have lower densities).

Normally graded conglomerate layer with a muddy matrix, Cerro Toro Formation, Chile

In recent years, some questions have been raised about the common presence of normal grading, especially in turbidites. The fact is that normal grading is often seen in rocks of all ages, and, in a simple view, it is a reflection of larger grains getting quickly to the bottom.

Normal grading is normal, after all.

The allegedly tsunami-related chevron-shaped nearshore deposits are back in the center of attention, at least among geo-bloggers. And rightly so: the idea that lots of coastal sand sheets all over the world were generated by relatively recent, impact-related mega-tsunamis of unimaginable scale is a fascinating hypothesis and, if proven true, it would revolutionize not only our understanding of frequency of meteorite impacts, but also change the predominant views about coastal geomorphology.

However, I have to confess that I find the geomorphologic and sedimentologic side of the argument fairly weakly constructed and documented, at least in the papers I was able to google up. Here are a few questions that could be asked to clarify some issues.

Many of the aerial photographs of the so-called chevrons could be used as textbook examples of parabolic dunes. Parabolic dunes are U-shaped wind-blown dunes usually fed by coastal sand deposits. Their nose points in a downwind direction, that is, the opposite way from barchan dunes. While wind strengths, direction, and sediment source are the main players in the generation of barchan dunes, vegetation plays a key role in the development of parabolic dunes. The ‘arms’ of a parabolic dune are left behind because they have a lower migration rate than the main body and the nose. The lower migration rate is due to plant growth in areas of lower sedimentation and/or erosion. There is a strong correlation between vegetation cover and dune migration rate or activity. This image comes from a recent paper by Duran et al.,

and it shows active (on the left) and inactive (on the right) parabolic dunes. Here is a sketch (source):

So the question is: if ‘chevrons’ are indeed different from classic eolian parabolic dunes, what is this difference, both geomorphologically and sedimentologically? Are they internally stratified? Do they show large-scale cross-bedding? What are the typical grain size distributions? Are they different from typical wind-blown sand? (One of the arguments is that large boulder fields occur in several places; however, my impression is that the boulders described here do not occur within, below, above, or right next to any chevron deposits. This short report claims that large pieces of rock are all over the place in the Madagascar chevrons, but no actual data is presented). The Madagascar chevrons featured in the New York Times show the signatures of typical parabolic dunes: U-shape, vegetated back sides and sandy crest plus nose. Why would an old tsunami deposit be vegetated only in certain places? The simple fact that these dunes are not entirely covered by vegetation suggests that their sandy parts do consist of wind-blown sand. Of course, tsunami deposits can be reworked by the wind, but why would the tsunami-related morphology be so well in tune with the eolian signature?

Second, if the chevrons are indeed produced by tsunamis, the tsunamis must have been humongous. Dune heights are related to flow depth, and a rule of thumb is that flow depth has to be around 6 times the dune height. So a 50 m high dune would require a 300 m high wave. Is that really possible? How big an impact do you need to generate such humongous waves? Also, what about the backwash? Why are most of the chevron dunes pointing systematically in one direction, and do not seem to be altered by any seaward oriented flow?

Third, are any features of the chevrons consistent with what we know about well-documented recent and ancient tsunami deposits? Tsunami-related sandy layers tend to be comparable to turbidites: largely unstratified, normally graded units suggesting rapid deposition from flows of decreasing velocity; they do not show large-scale cross bedding that requires relatively steady flow over longer time scales. In contrast, the chevron morphologies suggest that they are internally well-stratified, as the result of stoss-side avalanches. Here is a sand layer from the 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami (source):

Obviously, it may turn out that there are tsunami-related coastal dunes and wind-blown parabolic dunes, with very similar morphologies, but fundamentally different origins. At the moment, the geomorphologic and sedimentologic evidence for this extraordinary hypothesis seems quite preliminary. And, needless to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

ps. 1: Lots of information on tsunami deposits here.
And a paper arguing for wind-blown origin of some deposits from the Bahamas, previously interpreted as tsunami-related: Kindler, P. & Strasser, A. (2000) Palaeoclimatic significance of co-occurring wind- and water-induced sedimentary structures in the last-interglacial coastal deposits from Bermuda and the Bahamas. Sedimentary Geology 131, 1-7.

ps. 2: More good stuff on megatsunamis and their deposits at Highly Allochthonous.