Comparing sieve and sedimentation balance analysis of beach, lake and eolian sediments using log-hyperbolic parameters

Abstract

Sieving and settling analyses of 29 samples from different sedimentary environments have been compared with the use of invariant log-hyperbolic parameters. Settling velocities were not converted into millimetre size. The comparison was based on kurtosis, skewness and sorting of the distributions. The comparison of the parameter values have been evaluated by a two-tailed t-test. The log-hyperbolic parameters values for kurtosis between the two methods differed significantly for the beach sediments. Skewness differed significantly in all three environments and sorting only differed significantly for the beach sediments. ( q- N) a measure of fit between observations and the estimated log-hyperbolic distribution differed significantly in the beach and eolian sediments. The study shows that settling velocities give a better fit to the log-hyperbolic distribution opposed to sieve analysis. The study shows that the differences in the log-hyperbolic sediment parameter values differ significantly in nearly half of the comparisons. It is concluded, that great attention must be paid to the method of grain-size analysis.