Novel luminescence diagnosis of storm deposition across intertidal environments

Abstract

Salt marshes provide valuable nature-based, low-cost defences protecting against coastal flooding and erosion. Storm sedimentation can improve the resilience of salt marshes to accelerating rates of sea-level rise, which poses a threat to salt marsh survival worldwide. It is therefore important to be able to accurately detect the frequency of storm activity in longer-term sediment records to quantify how storms contribute to salt marsh resilience. Luminescence is able to infer how long mineral grains were exposed to sunlight prior to burial (e.g., the presence or absence of sediment processing). This study used sediment cores collected from the Ribble Estuary, North West England, to show that luminescence properties of sand-sized K-feldspar grains can diagnose the differential modes of deposition across intertidal settings (i.e., sandflat, mudflat and salt marsh) in longer-term sediment records by detecting the variability in sediment bleaching potential between settings (i.e., sediment exposure to sunlight), thus establishing a framework for the interpretation of luminescence properties of intertidal sediments. It then used modern sediment samples collected before and after a storm event to show how such properties can diagnose changes in sediment processing (i.e., bleaching potential) of mudflat sediments caused by storm activity, despite no changes in sediment composition being recorded by geochemical and particle size distribution analyses. This new luminescence approach can be applied to longer-term sediment records to reveal (and date) changes in the environment of deposition and/or depositional dynamics where there is no obvious stratigraphic evidence of such.