I’m pleased to announce the publication* of a comprehensive review paper of signal propagation concepts in sedimentary system analysis in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. My co-authors and I initiated the idea for this review way back in the spring of 2013. The notion that tectonic and climatic changes can be recorded in erosional landscapes and the depositional record as ‘signals’ for geologists to extract and examine has been around for decades, if not centuries. However, more recent ideas concerned with how such signals move through the landscape — and with that movement, how the signal of interest may lag, be dampened/amplified, or even destroyed — deserved a synthesis in our opinion.

The illustration below is the first figure of the paper and an attempt to summarize the idea of signals and signal propagation conceptually and schematically. We focus on sediment supply as the main ‘carrier’ of signals from source to sink.

We don’t set out to solve all the problems and answer all the questions related to signal propagation in this review. Rather, our aim is to present the ‘state of the art’ and identify the most interesting questions to a broader Earth science readership with the hope that researchers in overlapping fields (e.g., geomorphology, climatology, oceanography, tectonics, ecology, biogeochemistry, and many more) find some value in our perspective.

You can find a link to the paper on the Publications page.

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* this is the online early (‘in press’) version of the paper, which has a DOI and can now be cited