Climate and stratigraphy - Predicting sand by looking at depositional cycles

Climate change is known to affect the sedimentary response of depositional systems. This has particularly been shown for lacustrine and marine environments where there is generally a lack of internal sediment dynamics that can obscure a paleo climate signal. For that reason, fluvial systems are less straightforward to disentangle because avulsions, crevasse splay formation and channel abandonments form an inherent part of the system regardless of climate forcing. However, by looking at the more distal part of fluvial systems, being the floodplain deposits, Tim Baars from Delft University of Technology managed to demonstrate a cyclic trend in Upper Carboniferous fluvial successions in the Netherlands. In this podcast, Tim explains how he did this.